Hi David,
A couple of factors are at play here, but we have to flag a number of local companies apply some poetic licence here otherwise we wouldn’t regularly see 20-30% moves through reporting (confession) season:
- In Australia, ASX-listed companies must comply with continuous disclosure obligations under the ASX Listing Rules and the Corporations Act.
- If an earnings result (or forecast update) differs materially from prevailing market expectations or previous guidance enough to likely impact the share price, the company must disclose it.
Consensus figures are an average of analyst forcasts, with brokers/analysts supplying these to data vendors. They have the choice of supplying (or not) to different vendors. Not all analysts feed their forecasts into every data provider, so consensus can differ between data vendors as the inputs can be slightly different, but conensus does give us the best view of market expectations collectively. Consensus forecasts can be seen on the MM website, which shows how many analysts forecasts are included to devive ‘consensus’. For example, the earnings forecasts, broker calls, target prices etc can be seen at the bottom of the page here for BHP.
We source the data for the MM website from LSEG, but we also use Bloomberg for our analysis, and often discuss Bloomberg consensus in our reports. We think these two providers are best in market.
