Felda's recommendations: Bloomberg needs to check its data

Article in The Edge, attributed to Bloomberg, one snippet:


The company has a lot of potential to unlock and its share price is attractive, Ivy Ng, an analyst at CIMB Bank Bhd said in a July 31 report. Ng, who is top ranked and has returned 63% for her call on Felda, has the only buy call out of 14 analyst recommendations, according to Bloomberg data.


I have never written much about Felda, to me it looks more like a (partially) political play with a (strong) social element involved, not exactly a market-driven, commercial company that one would expect to find on Bursa (Bursa apparently thinks differently about this).

However, an analyst who is top ranked and has returned 63% on this stock, that does draw my attention.

With the help of Google I found the following report (dated August 6, 2012) written by the same analyst, conveniently archived by i3Investor:

A 93-page (!) research report with terms like "Coming into bloom", "Dominant agri group", "Room for growth", "M&A is the key", that sounds all rather optimistic with hindsight.

And the target price ..... RM 5.05!

In other words, investors who bought based on that target price in 2012 are sitting on a loss of 62% (excluding dividends but also excluding costs) over a timespan of exactly four years instead of a profit of 63%.

Is it possible that Bloomberg only checked the latest recommendation (possibly a few months old) from this analyst?

Probably, but I don't think that would be the right thing to do.