What is the Est Rev: Top 30 Up screen?
The Est Rev: Top 30 Up screen ranks the thirty stocks whose analysts have raised their current-year earnings forecasts by the largest percentage over the past month. It is one of four earnings-estimate-revision screens maintained by the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII), built on the consensus estimates that Stock Investor Pro draws from the I/B/E/S database. Of the roughly 8,000 securities that database tracks, only about half carry analyst estimates at all, so the screen already narrows the field to companies Wall Street actively follows. Among those, it keeps the thirty with the sharpest upward move — the growth-and-momentum end of the estimate-revision family, and the most concentrated of the upward screens.
Why rising estimates matter
A share price already contains whatever the market currently expects a company to earn. What moves the price is a change in that expectation. When the consensus forecast for this fiscal year (Y0) and next year (Y1) both climb, analysts are collectively saying the business is doing better than they thought a month ago — a product is selling, a margin is widening, an end market is turning. This screen treats the direction and size of that revision as the signal, not the absolute level of earnings. It is a momentum idea grounded in fundamentals rather than in the chart: buy the companies whose reported and forecast numbers are being marked up, on the view that estimates tend to move the same way more than once.
What the screen looks for
- Stocks traded over the counter (OTC) are excluded.
- More than four analysts publish a current-year (Y0) estimate — at least five, which filters out most micro-cap names that one or two forecasters could swing.
- The current consensus estimate for this fiscal year (Y0) is higher than it was one month ago.
- The consensus for next fiscal year (Y1) is also higher than a month ago.
- At least one analyst revised the Y0 estimate upward in the past month, and none revised it down.
- At least one analyst revised the Y1 estimate upward in the past month, and none revised it down.
- From the stocks that clear those tests, the screen keeps the 30 with the largest percentage increase in the current-year (Y0) consensus over the past month.
The evidence behind estimate-revision drift
The rationale is one of the more durable findings in market research. Ball and Brown documented in 1968 that prices keep drifting in the direction of an earnings surprise well after the news is public; Bernard and Thomas later formalized this post-earnings-announcement drift. Estimate revisions behave the same way, because analysts rarely make the whole adjustment at once. AAII's reading of the data is that stocks with meaningful upward revisions go on to outperform, and that the effect can linger for as long as a year after the change. There is also a herding-of-surprises pattern: one upbeat revision often precedes another, the way you rarely spot a single cockroach. Large, heavily covered firms price this in fastest, which is part of why less-crowded names on the list still reward independent digging.
What to keep in mind
Ranking by percentage change has a built-in trap. A company earning a penny that is revised to nine cents posts a 900% jump and can crowd out more meaningful moves, so check the dollar size of the revision and the number of analysts behind it before treating a name as a real signal. Upward-revision momentum also reverses hard when a company finally misses, and by the time a stock reaches this list its good news may already sit inside a rich valuation. The screen finds enthusiasm; it does not tell you what you are paying for it.
Sources
Ball, R., and Brown, P., "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers," Journal of Accounting Research, 1968; Bernard, V., and Thomas, J., "Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift: Delayed Price Response or Risk Premium?" Journal of Accounting Research, 1989.
American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) — Stock Investor Pro screen definition and commentary.