This is interesting. I may have mentioned in earlier pieces on UBS that the Swiss bank has put together a team that works in something called the Evidence Lab.
No, this isn’t the home of the home of fictional coronor-turned-sleuth, Quincy ME (those who haven’t heard of him you’ll find some old episodes on YouTube).
Anyway, I digress. The Evidence Lab has been set up to use new, high-tech methods of garnering information on companies.
In the case of Merlin Entertainments PLC (LON:MERL) it has used advanced web-scraping to collate and then interpret 600,000 reviews of the owner of attractions such as the London Eye and Alton Towers.
“The latest edition of our customer review analysis, coupled with very strong tourism spending growth in the UK, gives us confidence that 2017 will be a year of stronger revenue growth,” the broker concluded.
Not only did UBS repeat its ‘buy’ advice on the stock, it raised its price target from 515p a share to 560p.
According to the Broker Forecasts site six on the nine analysts following Merlin are ‘buyers’. The remainder think the stock is fully valued.