Robot Analyst Tells Investors To Sell Facebook And Google

Written by Staff

Oct 06, 2017

Wells Fargo’s new bot analyst has sell ratings on tech giants Alphabet and Facebook — ratings that are at odds with
Wall Street, which remains mostly bullish on these firms.

Introduced in September, AIERA is an artificially intelligent equity research analyst bot that does massive automated grunt work to support human analysts as they track stocks and make trade recommendations.

From Bloomberg. Story by Julie Verhage.

While human analysts are still overwhelmingly bullish on Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., a new robot analyst at Wells Fargo says it’s time to sell.

Late last month, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Sena introduced AIERA. While analysts are known to skew toward buy ratings, the new bot doesn’t seem to share the bias.

“AIERA’s approach this week appears decidedly more conservative (than last week), as she places a ‘hold’ recommendation on 11 names and even going so far as to place Google and Facebook in the ‘sell’ category,” Sena said in a new note sent out to clients on Friday.

Facebook stock climbed 48 percent this year, and has 42 buys out of 47 ratings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Google parent Alphabet, up 24 percent in 2017, is similarly beloved, with 34 buys out of 41 ratings.

“AIERA remains in test and learn mode,” Sena said.