You may see one bank's analysts do this, but others should balance them out. If one bank's analysts are routinely off every quarter, no one will listen. All th

You may see one bank's analysts do this, but others should balance them out. If one bank's analysts are routinely off every quarter, no one will listen. All the analysts could conspire to set impossible targets, but the only way to profit would be considered illegal. For this reason bank's have a Chinese wall between analysts and traders. On a similar topic, I think it's common to see CEOs try to mislead analysts into lowering their targets. I believe this happened with Apple for a long time, but to the same effect - analysts stopped listening to Cook's guidance.