Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

What financial data are analysed (and how) to come up with a stock recommendation?
Let me start with a somewhat sarcastic statement: There are probably as many things done to analyze a stock as there are people doing the analysis! That said, at a general level an analyst researches the historical performance of the company at a fairly detailed level (operations within divisions of the company, product development cycles within divisions, expenses vs income trends for each division and product, marketing costs, customer acquisition costs, etc); gathers information about what the company is doing now AND planning to do in the future -- often by a discussion with principles at the company; establishes a view on related macro-economic trends, sector and industry trends, demographic trends, etc.; and combines it all to forecast a change in revenues, margins, free cash flow, dividends, etc. over a period of time.   They then apply statistics that relate those numbers to stock price in order to imply stock prices and price ranges over those same periods.  Finally, depending on how those stock prices compare to the current stock price, they'll classify the stock as Buy, Sell, Hold, etc. This sounds like alot of work.   And it generally is if you get detailed about it, which is what professionals or significant money managers are doing.   However, there are also lots of arm-chair analysts posting their output on any number of financial sites (Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, etc.) if you'd like to really explore the range of detail some people consider as a "stock analysis".  That sounds more negative than I intended it to be, so let me clarify that I think some of these write-ups are really quite good IMO.