The week in analyst ratings: August 17, 2026
19 upgrades, 14 downgrades and 4 new initiations across ~500 US large caps this week, and which firms' calls have the track records to back them.
Wall Street firms published 37 rating changes across StockRank's ~500-stock US coverage this past week: 19 upgrades, 14 downgrades and 4 initiations. Here are the calls from the firms with the strongest measured track records, as of August 17, 2026.
Notable calls, ranked by the caller's record
| Ticker | Firm | Action | Rating | Firm's 12M hit rate | |---|---|---|---|---| | HLT | CICC | Initiated | Outperform | 80% (n=10) | | MAR | CICC | Initiated | Outperform | 80% (n=10) | | MRK | Daiwa Capital | Upgrade | Outperform | 56% (n=18) | | TMUS | Wolfe Research | Downgrade | Peer Perform | 52% (n=134) | | SYK | Wolfe Research | Downgrade | Peer Perform | 52% (n=134) | | BIIB | Wolfe Research | Upgrade | Outperform | 52% (n=134) | | ABBV | Wolfe Research | Upgrade | Outperform | 52% (n=134) | | ABT | Wolfe Research | Upgrade | Outperform | 52% (n=134) | | APP | BofA Securities | Downgrade | Neutral | 43% (n=957) | | ADSK | Goldman Sachs | Initiated | Neutral | 49% (n=746) | | ALL | Citigroup | Downgrade | Sell | 46% (n=1352) | | HPE | Morgan Stanley | Upgrade | Overweight | 45% (n=1402) |
Hit rate = share of the firm's historical buy-equivalent ratings that beat the S&P 500 over the following 12 months, computed by StockRank; n = evaluated ratings. Live version on the ratings feed and Top Firms leaderboard.
How to read it
Wolfe Research dominated this week's activity, initiating three upgrades across the healthcare and telecom sectors while downgrading two names. The firm's 52% accuracy rate over 134 calls in the past year sits near the middle of the leaderboard, placing these moves neither at the top of the track-record rankings nor at the bottom. CICC opened coverage on two hospitality stocks with matching Outperform ratings, backed by an 80% hit rate on just ten prior calls, the strongest accuracy mark in this batch. That small sample size, however, offers less statistical weight than larger track records like Citigroup's 1,352 prior ratings, which inform ALL's downgrade to Sell.
The downgrades this week outnumbered upgrades by a 5:2 margin among these top-tier firms. BofA Securities and Citigroup both moved lower on their respective targets, while Wolfe Research offset its two downgrades with three moves in the opposite direction. Goldman Sachs' initiation of ADSK at Neutral represents a middle-ground entry point; the firm's 49% accuracy across 746 prior ratings sits in line with the broader group's historical performance. Morgan Stanley's upgrade of HPE to Overweight came from a firm with one of the largest call histories shown here at 1,402 ratings, though its 45% accuracy rate trails several others in the sample.
The necessary caveats
Everything above is a descriptive snapshot of third-party analyst opinions (via Yahoo Finance, delayed), aggregated by StockRank. Ratings and price targets are the published views of the named firms, not StockRank's, and historical accuracy does not guarantee future results. Nothing in this article is investment advice or a recommendation. Methodology (windows, benchmark, minimum samples) is published in full here.
Every rating change across our coverage lands on the live ratings feed daily.