Support The Troops And Your Portfolio

With U.S. military spending now reaching half a trillion dollars per year, investors have shown plenty of appetite for defense stocks. Over the last 12 months, shares of aerospace and defense companies in the S&P 500 have outpaced the broader index by 14 percentage points.

If you’re looking to invest in this sector, research from brokerage house analysts may be a good place to turn for ideas. But which analysts? A starting point: the six identified as the tops for aerospace and defense in our annual Forbes.com/StarMine survey.

Compiled by StarMine and published this week by Forbes in print and online, the rankings name brokerage analysts who had the best track records during calendar 2004 in two areas: the accuracy of their earnings estimates and the timeliness of their recommendations on whether to buy, sell or hold.

Full story at Forbes.com

The Best Brokerage Analysts

The world’s brokerage houses employ 6,000 stock analysts. That’s a lot of opinions to follow, but we cut through all the noise and zeroed in on the elite in the business. Our rankings present equity analysts who in 2004 proved themselves superior at one of two skills: accurately forecasting earnings or recommending when to buy, hold or sell.

The bulk of our information comes to us courtesy of StarMine, a San Francisco research organization and our partner in this project. Since 1998, StarMine has built a business on a simple premise: Certain brokerage analysts are worth listening to more than others. With the right amount of number crunching, it’s possible to not only identify the best analysts but to profit from that knowledge as well.

Full story at Forbes.com