Stock Exchange Recommendations and Economic Realities

The aim of this paper is to present the impact of stock recommendations on the prices in the context of excessive optimism heuristic. The main goal of the conducted analysis is to show that investors on the Warsaw Stock Exchange seem to ignore the economic information that comes with the recommendation report. Also, as the analyzed recommendations are set in the specified economic conditions, authors would like to show that reports are biased with excessive optimism. The research of the structure of recommendations was issued for the biggest companies of the Polish market listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2012. The investigation showed that the ambiguity of the creation methods of analytical reports and differences in valuation of companies causes subjectivism in analysts’ assessments, which leads to heuristic effects. According to the authors, the structure of reports and their specificity shows that excessive optimism is an important factor in creation of stock exchange recommendations.