MeshRanks: Which financial analysts actually deliver results in the Saudi Stock Market?
After analyzing hundreds of stock recommendations for the past 18 months from financial analysts on TickerChart and other sites like Argaam focused on providing ‘reliable analysis’ of the Saudi stock market, I found an interesting fact: only 42% of these predictions actually materialized into profitable outcomes for investors. This concerning success rate, which is slightly worse than random guessing highlights a critical information gap in our financial ecosystem. Despite their outsized influence on investment decisions in Saudi Arabia, there has been no systematic review to my knowledge to evaluate analysts’ track records.
With MeshRanks, I aim to address this information deficit by providing individual investors with evidence-based indicators to see which analysts offer useful advice, if any, and in which particular sectors.
Try the tool here: https://mealkhowaiter.shinyapps.io/MeshRanks/
Many stock market investors in Saudi Arabia rely heavily on anecdotal advice from online forums or analyst recommendations on sites like Argaam and TickerChart, but without a reliable way to verify the historical investment performance of those analysts. MeshRanks uses several quantitative metrics to assess financial advisors. The tool records predictions and compares them against actual market outcomes across different time periods and market segments. I hope that this helps individuals identify which analysts provide consistently reliable guidance to investors.
For this initial beta release, I focused on the top six financial analysts from TickerChart based on their follower count and market influence.[1] Future iterations will expand to include a broader sample of analysts from additional platforms like Argaam and other Saudi finance-focused analysis sites.
The tool’s beta version contains the following features:
1. Overview: Shows user a glance of which analysts have the best overall prediction accuracy across all stocks and sectors.
2. Sector analysis: Provides users information about which analysts perform best in specific economic sectors. For instance, an analyst might excel at predicting oil company stocks but performs poorly on banking stocks.
3. Individual stock comparison: This tab is useful if you are interested in buying more of a given stock (e.g. Aramco or Al Rajhi Bank) and deciding which specific financial analysts have given the most accurate advice about that particular company. Specifically, the tool computes how much you would have earned from a hypothetical 10,000 SAR investment had you followed each analyst’s recommendations in a particular company, which allows users to directly compare the financial impact of choosing one advisor over another.
4. Time trends: Shows whether an analyst's predictions are becoming more or less accurate over time, helping you identify analysts whose performance is improving rather than declining.
Why It Matters?
For individual investors, MeshRanks provides guidance for selecting trusted advisors based on verified performance rather than reputation alone. My analysis shows that consistently following top-performing analysts (as identified by MeshRanks) would have generated returns approximately 23% higher than following average-ranked analysts over the past 18 months.
[1] The six analysts included in this initial release are Abu Abdullah, Abu Asail, Aldaher, Jamal AbdulHamid, Maha Saeed, and Mostafa Abdelaziz.