Yahoo Finance Why the Astrazeneca share price (LON:AZN) could go higher
Stockopedia’s own data points to a jarringly simple stock market truth amidst the daily whirlwind of financial data: share prices that have gone up tend to keep going up.
It sounds almost astonishingly simple but people instinctively distrust this momentum effect - surely successful investing can’t be so easy? One of the most convincing explanations for this stock market factor is the conservatism bias - the idea that people are slow to revise their expectations when presented with new information.
That means that when the market finds a stock breaking new all-time highs or beating broker estimates it tends to undervalue this development. The rational investor can take advantage of this mispricing. Stockopedia’s Momentum Rank is a convenient way of summarising the momentum attributes of a stock - let’s use Astrazeneca (LON:AZN) as an example.
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How to spot Momentum opportunities
The Momentum Rank is inspired by the latest research into momentum from leading academics (including Jegadeesh and Titman, George and Hwang, and Seung-Chan Park) and is based on a composite of the following Price and Estimate Momentum Factors.
Each company in the market is ranked from 1 to 100 for each of these momentum ratios and a composite score is calculated as a weighted average of all valid values. Applying this to Astrazeneca yields an impressive Momentum Rank of 92 - suggesting that this stock should be looked at more closely.
A high Momentum Rank should not be ignored - over the past seven years, a quarterly re-balanced portfolio of 90-100 Momentum Rank stocks has handily outperformed the FTSE All-Share (as have the 70-80 and 80-90 deciles).
Studies indicate that combining factors such as Value, Quality and Momentum is a more effective way of outperforming the market over longer time frames. That's why we have constructed our StockReports to give an instant impression of how well exposed Astrazeneca (LON:AZN) is to these three factors. We go into greater detail on factor investing in this video.
Stockopedia helps you to identify return-enhancing factors such as Quality, Value and Momentum by analysing thousands of data points every day. To find out more about you find investment opportunities and analyse your portfolios then take one of our two-week free trials and have a look around.
