Volatile markets might keep you up at night, but long-term investors would do well to remember that they’re also a chance to get high-quality stocks at bargain prices. Hey, any time blue-chip stocks go on sale, investors should be ready to pounce.
Wall Street analysts certainly think that way. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 4% in the first quarter of 2018. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost nearly 3%, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite declined 2%. And the general retreat in share prices has analysts licking their chops over all the great buys to be found.
From financial services to the energy sector to tech stocks, brand-name companies with massive market values look like rock-solid buys, analysts say. To see which blue-chip stocks they love the most, we turned to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
S&P Global Market Intelligence surveys analysts’ ratings on stocks and scores them on a five-point scale, where 1.0 equals “Strong Buy” and 5.0 means “Strong Sell.” Any score of 2.0 or lower means that analysts, on average, rate the stock a buy. The closer the score gets to 1.0, the better.
After screening the S&P 500 for large-cap, blue-chip stocks with the best analyst scores, we came up with 30 companies. These are the buy-rated blue chips that Wall Street analysts love the most.
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Data is as of April 4, 2018. Companies are listed by strength of analysts’ buy recommendations, from lowest to highest. Dividend yields are calculated by annualizing the most recent quarterly payout and dividing by the share price. Analysts’ ratings provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Click on ticker-symbol links in each slide for current share prices and more.
