Regarding "consensus"Real money managers don't care about...

Regarding "consensus"

Real money managers don't care about consensus. Professionals see it as utter noise.

... Here are some quotes ... I could give you way more ... share them as I have read very widely

"Man is extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty. To deal with his discomfort man tends to create a false sense of security by substituting certainty for uncertainty. It becomes the herd instinct. The irony is the greater the uncertainty the greater the similarity in predictions as the experts shout together in the dark. In turn the greater will be the collective surprise when their predictions miss the mark. The less information there is about reality often the more uniform the conventional wisdom will be" --- Tao Jones Averages (legendary investment book )

"Warren and Charlie could afford to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on experts. They have never done that. They have never even spent $50,000 on an analyst or $100,000 on an analyst." --- Mohnish Pabrai

"I'd prefer not to know what the analysts think .. it clouds one's judgement - I'd rather be dispassionate" ---- Peter Cundill

"Too many sell-side analysts whisper in each other's ears, and few want to stick his or her neck out too far. There's not much of a reason to be a hero if being wrong can cost you your job" ---- John Neff

“When an analyst first makes a forecast for a company’s earnings two years prior to the actual event, they are on average wrong by a staggering 94%. Even at a 12 month time horizon, they are wrong by around 45%!. To put it mildly, analysts don’t have a clue about future earnings.” ----- James Montier

“When it comes to projecting earnings, the track record of analysts is spotty at best and highly inaccurate at worst” ---- Christopher Browne

“I have repeatedly found that analysts tend to peg their target prices in the vicinity of the current stock price” ---Mohnish Pabrai

“What is the role of brokers in your security section? Non” --- Jeffrey Ubben

“Wall Street has a couple habits. One habit is that present circumstances are projected to infinity. It tends to believe that whatever is going on today is the way the world will be forever” ---- Mohnish Pabrai

“Invariably, analysts do not see changes coming – they tend to do what I call “rear-view mirror analysis” by projecting along a straight line from the most recent past and therefore oftentimes miss some big moves.” ----Jim Tisch

...

in essence analysts are not going to help you and using any measure of what they put out is foolish.