The table contains five possible investment recommendations: Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Underperform and Sell. They are based on the five recommendation categories used by most investment advisory organizations. The terminology may vary from one firm to another (for example, some might label the third recommendation "neutral" instead of "hold"). But whatever set of labels you see, you can assume that the investment advisors are ranking stocks in a five-step, best-to-worst sequence.

Critics of Wall Street research point out that brokerage firm analysts are quick to recommend purchases of stock, but almost never advise customers to sell. You can evaluate this by examining Market Guide Recommendation tables for a large number of stocks. If you do that, you are very likely to find that "Underperform" and "sell" recommendations are extremely rare. "Neutral" ratings aren't quite so scarce, but they do appear far less frequently than do "Strong Buy" and "Buy" recommendations. Fortunately for you, Multex.com compiles, and Market Guide presents, additional information that enables you to derive worthwhile real-world Wall Street recommendations despite the fact that analyst ratings tend to cluster toward the top of the scale.

The last row of the table presents the "Mean Rating." This is a weighted average of all the individual ratings. The best possible score would be 1.0 (to achieve that, every analyst would have to rate the stock a "Strong Buy" and the worst possible score would be 5.0. Realistically, given the aforementioned top-of-the-rating-scale bias, you should expect most Mean Ratings to fall in the 1.00-3.00 range. But within that context, you still can, and should, compare a stock's Mean Rating to those of others you are considering and favor those with better (i.e. lower number) scores.

Also, look at the columns showing the Recommendations four, eight and twelve weeks ago. If you are a momentum investor, you will want to favor stocks for which there are a gradually increasing number of top recommendations, or improving Mean Rating scores. Those who prefer out-of-favor stocks may take a different approach. Such investors would prefer stocks for which the Mean Rating has been deteriorating. A Mean Rating that is stable (or modestly better) from the four-week ago period to the present after having deteriorated from the twelve to eight to four week-ago intervals might be especially interesting. This trend could be signaling the early stages of a turnaround. A gradual increase in the number of recommendations over the past twelve weeks would indicate that Wall Street is turning its eye toward a company that had previously been ignored or undiscovered.