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About Broker Recommendations provided by Hemscott Group plc

The different wording of  broker recommendations is due to the different ways that brokers choose  to report forecasts to the LSE itself.

Recommendations can be a straightforward 'buy', 'sell' or 'hold', for example. More often, it lies somewhere between or even beyond these three terms, for example 'weak hold', or 'overweight', and each broker has a range of perhaps eight to twelve such gradations.

Some  brokers  use  a combination of numbers, for example; 
1 = Outperform, 2 = In-line, 3 = Underperform; 

combined  with letters highlighting a risk assessment, ranging upwards as follows;
L = Low Risk, M = Medium Risk, H = High Risk, S = Speculative.

So, for example '1L' means Outperform/Low Risk

Recommendations from a given broker must be viewed in its full context, namely the entire text of the research it is based on, the share price at the time of writing, and the full range of recommendations employed by that broker.

This would explain why some values are "Reduce 2" and others just "Reduce" - since "Reduce 1" is actually Reduce/In-line.

Hemscott Group plc