Analysts tend to lean away from more bearish ratings as it can sour corporate relations and- in extreme cases- even lead to dismissal: see Mike Mayo and Adnaan Ahmad as two warning cases. “My views have been controversial in the global tech space and I have taken a fair amount of abuse” Ahmad said after he was fired for his relentlessly bleak Apple predictions in 2015.

So, given their rarity, these more cautious ratings are worth tracking even for stock bulls. Why has a particular analyst decided to go against the crowd on a top stock? Rare hold or sell ratings have added weight if they come from the Street’s best-performing analysts who have proven track records of successful stock predictions.

We can find the latest bearish ratings by selecting the right filters on TipRanks’ popular Daily Analyst Recommendations tool. We chose hold / sell ratings and excluded rating upgrades. Cut out underperforming analysts by limiting the results to only ratings from four or five-star analysts.

You can also select the stock type (by sector and market cap) and filter how experts are ranked (against the sector for example, or the S&P 500). Now let’s use these filters to find three hot stocks with rare neutral/ bearish ratings:

1. Amazon (AMZN)- this is one of the Street’s top stocks, hence its strong buy analyst consensus rating on TipRanks. In the last three months only 2 out of 35 analysts have published hold rather than buy ratings on the stock. Five-star Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler downgraded the stock yesterday with a bearish price target of $925 (2% upside from current share price). He blamed margins for Amazon’s cloud business AWS.

“We expect less near-term upside for AWS given December price cuts and increasing competition (e.g. Google),” writes Kessler, following 7 price cuts announced for December 1. “At current levels, we believe Amazon will need to begin to show greater operating leverage for shares to move meaningfully higher and reach our bull case.”

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