The purpose of the paper is to compare unofficial forecasts of earnings known as quot;whispersquot; to forecasts generated by First Call analysts. Our sample consists of approximately 900 whispers found primarily on message boards on investor web sites between 1995 and 1997. Our analysis yields...

In this paper, we compare First Call analyst forecasts to unofficial forecasts of quarterly earnings per share commonly referred to as whisper forecasts. Our analysis yields the following results. First, we find that whispers are, on average, more accurate than First Call forecasts and are...