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Analyst ratings on S&P 500 companies
A stock rating is one analyst at one bank telling you what they think. Buy, hold, or sell. Three words, easy to read off a screen, and that's exactly why they get quoted everywhere. The trouble is that one of those three words barely gets used. Roughly one rating in twenty is a sell, in a market where about a quarter of stocks fall in a typical year. So the scale you think you're reading and the scale that's actually being used are two different things.
This page lays out the real distribution. 12,840 ratings on S&P 500 companies as of June 2026, split into buy, hold and sell, with the five year averages sitting next to them so you can see whether this is a passing mood or simply how the business works. There's a sector breakdown as well, and a section on why sell ratings are so scarce. The reasons aren't a conspiracy. They're incentives, and they're well documented.
I put it together because a rating is one of the first pieces of information a new investor bumps into, and almost nobody bothers to explain that the labels don't mean what they appear to mean. Once you've seen the distribution, you can't unsee it. Everything here comes from a single FactSet count on a single date, and that piece is linked at the foot of the page. Open it and read it yourself, it takes about two minutes.
Across 12,840 analyst ratings on S&P 500 companies in June 2026, 59.4% were Buy, 35.7% Hold and just 4.9% Sell. That is not a temporary bullish phase. The five year averages are 55.8% Buy, 38.7% Hold and 5.6% Sell. Roughly one rating in twenty is negative, in a market where about a quarter of stocks fall in a typical year. A rating scale on which one option is used 5% of the time is not really a three point scale.
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