Analyzing the Analysts: Using average analyst price target to identify buying opportunities amongst the top 100 companies in the S&P

Hello everyone,

I'm a lazy investor and don't like to do much due diligence, but I do like to make money. Unfortunately these two things about me are often at odds as I've lost money in the past for not doing my DD. As such, I continue to be lazy but I try and find ways to work around doing due diligence and hopefully finding loop holes.

One such way that I have been thinking about recently is using analyst ratings, reviews and price targets as a surrogate for due diligence. In essence, I try to just have these analysts do the work for me. The idea is that much in the same way that with those who believe in technical analysis hold that everything you need to know about a stock is baked into it's price action, and so when something good happens the stock price goes up and when something bad happens the stock price goes down, thus all you need is to analyze trends in stock price and you'll be analyzing everything about the stock by proxy, I have a thesis (or theory) that perhaps you can do the same or something similar with analyst price targets of companies.

Now I know that anyone who has read this far already thinks I'm an idiot. Many experienced individual investors probably find market analysts to be stupid and therefore I'm stupid for following their lead, but I would argue to the contrary for a few reasons. As much as I have put in a lot of effort to learn about how the market operates (been investing for the last 6 years, started learning actively about it as much as I could a couple years prior to that), there is still much I don't know as I don't have a finance or economics degree. Moreover, as bad as you may think an analyst is, they are at least competent enough to keep their job as an analyst at the investment firm that allows them to make stock price target selections. Lastly, and most importantly, what I am about to discuss below uses the aggregate of numerous analyst price targets so I'm not relying on a single analyst, but several (probably between 10 and 40 per company). I think if two-dozen analysts are strongly in favor of a company, it is unlikely that my novice investor wisdom would have researched the company and found a flaw that they all missed.

So what I did yesterday evening was go through the top 100 S&P 500 companies by market cap and find the current average price target for them on Yahoo Finance. I then divided the current stock price (at the close on 7/31) by that price target and expressed it as a percentage to see how far off the company was from the average price target analysts were aiming for. Then I also listed how many total ratings each company had, and how many of them were 'Strong Buys' and 'Buys'.

This yielded the following table:

Based on this table above, I tried to identify some companies that met a few criteria. I wanted to identify companies that had at least 25% of their analyst ratings be 'Strong Buys', to have at least 20 analyst ratings available and for the current stock price to be at 90% or less of the average price target. This lead me to the following 11 companies:
Micron Technologies (MU), Boston Scientific (BSX), Abbot Laboratories (ABT), Merck Scientific (MRK), Stryker (SYK), The Cigna Group (CI), Broadcom (AVGO), Comcast (CMCSA), Honeywell International (HON), Analogue Devices (ADI), and Intuit Inc. (INTU)

I have about $5,000 I'd like to invest right now and I have half a mind to just put it equally weighted into these 11 companies and just watch it for the next year or two. I'll either do that or put it all in VOO, but I have a feeling that these 11 companies might beat the S&P 500 over the next 24 months.

What do you guys think?