creator Gogolak, William Peter 2022 Spring 2022 Dissertation Illinois Institute of Technology SSB / Stuart School of Business advisor Cai, Li advisor Anand, Smriti Finance Management analyst recommendations forecasting models insider stock holding levels investor relations top management team en I pursued two competing theories about insider stock holding levels and analyst recommendations. The complementary hypothesis states that top management and analysts conduct actions in a comparable manner; the contradicting hypothesis states that insiders and analysts exhibit opposite market actions (Hsieh and Ng, 2019). I examined insider stock holding levels and analyst recommendations. I analyzed a sample of S&P 500 firms from 2011-2020. In this sample, I found that the relationship between insider holding levels and analyst recommendations are opposite in concurrent time periods; thus, supporting the contradictory hypothesis. I also analyzed lagged insider holdings levels in a granger causality test. This test supports the idea that top management stock holdings increase when analysts downgrade stocks, and the opposite effect it true when analysts upgrade stocks. Using a sample of S&P 500 firms from 2011 – 2020, I provided support to my hypothesis that aggregated analyst recommendations forecast future aggregate equity returns. Furthermore, I conducted a test to support my conclusion that changes to insider holding levels should be used to forecast changes in future equity returns, beyond what is already explained by analyst recommendations. I argue two compelling additions that I make to the existing body of work regarding aggregate stock prediction. First, I build upon existing papers by using Bloomberg aggregate analyst recommendations as opposed to the IBES datasets. Second, I expand upon recent index forecasting papers by incorporating both aggregate analyst recommendations and aggregate insider holding levels into aggregate stock return models. born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access http://hdl.handle.net/10560/islandora:1024852