In the large-cap Russell 1,000, there are more than 18,800 individual analyst ratings, meaning the average stock in the roughly 1,000-member index has more than 18 analyst recommendations. It’s widely known that there are way more “buy” ratings than “sell” or “hold” ratings, but to put a number to it, right now 54.5% of all analyst ratings in the Russell 1,000 are “buy” ratings. (A “buy” rating includes terms like “outperform” or “overweight” that some firms prefer to use.)

Today we wanted to provide you with a list of the current stocks in the Russell 1,000 that have the highest percentage of “buy” ratings. These could be considered the most loved stocks by Wall Street analysts. (To be included on the list below, the stock needed to have at least five analyst ratings.)

Starting at the top, there are nine stocks that have 100% buy ratings, and the name with the most number of buys is Alexandria Real Estate (ARE) at eleven.WillScot Mobile (WSC), Royalty Pharma (RPRX), Liberty Media Sirius XM (LSXMA), Kirby (KEX), Curtiss-Wright (CW), Churchill Downs (CHDN), Service Corp (SCI), and Howard Hughes (HHH) are the eight other stocks with 100% buy ratings. The remaining eleven stocks shown have at least 93% buy ratings, and the most notable are two mega-caps with $1+ trillion market caps: Amazon (AMZN) and NVIDIA (NVDA). At the moment, 61 of 64 analyst ratings for Amazon (AMZN) are buys, while 59 of 63 ratings for NVIDIA (NVDA) are buys.

NVIDIA (NVDA) has already surged 232% in 2023, so it’s pretty remarkable that analysts are still this bullish on the name. It may be hard to believe, but the average analyst price target for NVDA has moved up to $638/share.NVDA’s current share price is 26.6% below that price target. The average stock in the Russell is only 14% below its consensus price target, so analysts expect more gains for NVDA than they do for the average name in the index.

Remember, from a contrarian’s perspective, a stock with an extremely high percentage of buy ratings may be a name to avoid. After all, once you get to 100%, there’s no more room for analysts to get more bullish!

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