What Hope For Malaysian Investing Public When Research House Makes Such Calls?

Here's a simple question.

If you are a research house and you lower a stock target price from 1.75 to 1.48, how should you classify your stock call?

1. Buy?
2. Neutral?
3. Sell?

Well, OSK calls it a TRADING BUY, Maintained!

LOL! I joke you not!

• Reiterate Trading BUY but at a lower fair value. The rebound in crude oil price is converse to the company’s decision to unwind all its fuel hedge positions in FY08, which also suggests operating cost will be higher. This prompts us to revise downwards our FY10 earning by 15.5% and our fair value to RM1.48. However, as the company’s ongoing fund raising exrcise may provide some excitement for its share price performance, we maintain our Trading BUY recommendation.

Price revised downwards by 15.5%

I am so confused, if it lowers the target price by so much, why can't OSK call it a sell?

Anyway, to recap, posted last month Here's A Nice Stock 'Tip' From OSK. If I take down all the buy calls from 2nd December 2008 to now, this is what I will get.

• 2nd December 2008. AirAsia is still a SELL with a target of 67 sen
• 9th December 2008. AirAsia is still a SELL with a target of 67 sen
• 23rd December 2008: AirAsia is now NEUTRAL with a target price of 0.93!!!!
• 29 May 2009, AirAsia is now a TRADING BUY with a target price of 1.78!!!!
• 14 July 2009. TRADING BUY maintained with a target price of 1.45!!!!

And my favourite Bahasa Malaysia phrase to reflect all of this, just has to be 'Macam mana ni?'.

In a span of just 8 months, how could a 'value' of a company move from 67 sen to 93 sen to 1.78 and back down to 1.45?

What hope does the Malaysian investing public have when a research house like OSK makes recommendations like this?