At The Motley Fool, we poke plenty of fun at Wall Street analysts and their endless cycle of upgrades, downgrades, and “initiating coverage at neutral.” Today, we’ll show you whether those bigwigs actually know what they’re talking about. To help, we’ve enlisted Motley Fool CAPS to track the long-term performance of Wall Street‘s best and worst.

And speaking of the best …
 Corning got a big boost Thursday, when ace stockpicker Bernstein announced it was initiating coverage of the LCD glassmaker at an outperform rating. Slapping a $15.20 price target on the stock, Bernstein promised investors at today’s prices the chance to earn a 21.4% profit on the shares themselves, and the practical guarantee of collecting Corning’s 2.9% dividend yield, as they wait for the shares to go up.

So, in total, a better than 24% profit in just 12 months of investing. Not a bad return … if Bernstein turns out to be correct. But is the analyst right about this one?

Let’s go to the tape
At first glance, indications look good. According to our CAPS stats, Bernstein is one of the better analysts out there today, ranking in the top 10% of investors we track, getting most of its stock picks right — and beating the market by an average of seven percentage points-per-pick.

Bernstein’s also got good reason to be recommending Corning. The company that invented the glass for Thomas Edison‘s light bulb, that dominates the market for glass used in LCD TVs and monitors, and whose “Gorilla Glass” product forms the screens of most of the world’s higher-end smartphones, recently announced a new flexible LCD glass that it’s calling “Willow” (because, you see, it bends).

According to Corning, no one in the industry has yet invented a product to take advantage of Willow Glass‘s unique property. But that’s the kind of thing that can change in a hurry in the tech world.

For example, manufacturers such as Samsung have encountered difficulties  designing around Apple‘s “rounded rectangle” design patent for the iPad. Now, imagine if you will, a “tablet” computer that’s not a rectangular tablet at all — but, perhaps, a cylinder shaped more like a rolling pin. Instead of swiping to scroll the screen up or down, you simply rotate your cylinder clockwise or counterclockwise to move up or down the screen. That’s the kind of innovation that flexible Willow Glass might make possible. Similar innovations might come out of Google , now that it’s in the computer hardware-making biz. Its recent interest in wearable computers, for example, might lend itself to a portable device that slides over the wrist, like an armband — again, an innovation that Willow could make possible.

Faster than the speed of tech
How quickly might Willow catch on? Consider this: Back in 2009, when Corning was still “boasting” of having just seven manufacturers starting to experiment with its Gorilla Glass, management predicted that, within a few …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance