Stock price predictions, explained honestly

Three different things get called a price prediction

• An analyst price target — an opinion about fair value from a model of the business, usually on a twelve-month horizon, and frequently revised to follow the price.
• A projected trend line — geometry: where the stock's own ceiling and floor sit in 3 months if recent behaviour continues at a damped rate.
• A measured target — a gain size that comparable past setups on that stock reached often enough, with the hit rate and the sample attached.

Only the third can be scored. This site publishes the second as a chart and the third as the number to act on.

Why the projection is drawn at half the fitted slope

Extending a trend at full slope assumes the last three years continue exactly. Measured across the stored history, roughly half of a channel's drift actually carried into the following six months. Halving it is not pessimism; it is the number that came out of the check, and it is the difference between a target that gets reached and one that looks good in a screenshot.

The hindsight trap in every "predicted high"

It is easy to measure the highest price a stock reached in the six months after a setup and publish it as a prediction. Over a window that long almost every stock prints a higher high somewhere, so the number is nearly always impressive — and useless, because you would only know it was the peak weeks after it passed. A price you can actually plan around is one you could have placed as a limit order in advance. That is why the published target is smaller than the best case and sits beside it rather than instead of it.

How to judge any forecast, including ours

• Was it published before the fact, and is the failed one still visible?
• Does it state a horizon and a hit rate, or only a price?
• How many comparable cases stand behind it — five, or fifty?
• Does it change when the price changes? A target that follows price is a description, not a prediction.

Ours are on the predictions page and every outcome, good and bad, is on the track record.

Read next

• How Trade The Path works, step by step
• Why trend channels work, and when they do not
• When to sell a stock
• All guides

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