archives@tulane.edu / Using hand-collected, professional designations of equity analysts as proxies for analyst accounting skills, this paper finds that analysts with strong accounting skills understand the net operating assets (NOA) anomaly. They provide more accurate and less optimistic earnings forecasts for firms with higher NOA. However, at the same time, they issue more optimistic recommendations for the same high NOA firms. This paper argues that conflicts of interests and the ways skilled analysts strategically incorporate the information into their outputs to achieve incentive-based goals drive this inconsistency. This strategic behavior of skilled analysts tends to create price discrepancies and might suggest that the NOA anomaly is more behavior-driven and less risk-oriented. / 1 / Miao He