As an IR professional, you might have a better chance than you think when it comes to gleaning fair coverage from the relationships you have with analysts: based on First Call's May 1997 five-point recommendation distribution scale (1 represents buy; 3, hold; and 5, sell), only 1.2 percent of reports (429 out of 35,869) recommended a sell.
*First Call is a source of realtime research, earnings estimates and corporate information for the financial community. It is a division of Thomson Financial Services, 617/856-2208