Abstract The brokerage firms and financial institutions recommend for buying and selling shares throughout the year. The objective of the paper is to investi- gate whether there is any scope to earn higher return than the market on the basis of recommendation offered. This paper has considered one eighty five recommendations from twenty firms spreading over a period from November 2005 to February 2007. The investment horizons of these recommendations have been taken as three months and six months. The return analysis of all recommendations for the whole period and in four different sub-periods has been determined. The analysis of beta suggests that average return from recommendation is lower than market return. The risk adjusted returns yielded by recommendation of different firms have been determined on the basis of Sharpe ratio, Trenor ratio, Jensen measure and finally Sortino ratio. It was observed from the analysis that the stock market recommendations might help the investor selectively. On the basis of the expertise based on in house research and experience many brokerage firms, financial institutions provide recommendations for buying and selling equity shares on a regular basis. There are various types of recommendations. Some firms provide only fee based advice. Some firms provide recommendations as value added service to make their core business like broking or investment banking more attractive. Some firms provide recommendations free of cost. Again there are some firms who provides recommendation primarily as fee based or value added service but those were made public at a later date (after 1 or 2 days). The firms offer free suggestions either as a means of advertisement or to demonstrate their superiority over others firms. There is another cause as well. These firms wish to increase the interest in some particular share of his own holding to increase the price of that particular share for their benefit. Efficient Market Hypothesis suggests that all the information is instantaneously absorbed in the stock market. Hence, none is in a position to earn higher return than the market continuously. On the contrary, Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) observed the impossibility of informationally efficient markets. They argued that if market prices captured all information about stock prices * Reader, Department of Commerce with Farm Management, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, e-mail :bkalpa.0to1@gmail.com ** Reader, Department of Commerce, Burdwan University, West Bengal Vidyasagar University Journal of Commerce Vol. 16, March, 2011/ISSN 0973-5917 Stock Market Recommendations: Does it Help Investors? Kalpataru Bandopadhyay* Debdas Rakshit**