Other than a straight " buy " or straight " sell " there are variations of these recommendations .Treat recommendations by brokers with a healthy scepticism imo. I have never heard a broker recommend " avoid like the plague" for a stock ! When the Nasdaq 100 reached it's peak of around 5000 in March 2000 there was hardly a sell rating on any stock and many of those very same stocks already had mind numbing valuations ! Buy ratings are as common as muck. If you are going to invest in the stock market yourself you should also be doing your own research , and then look for the reasons behind a particular rating by a broker. At the end of the day you have to give consideration to the fact that the salaries of the analysts are ,to some extent, derived from the companies they are reviewing - the financial industry got bad press about this in 2001.