If he simply wants to cover his behind, he evaluates a stock based on the algorithms he learned in college. If a year later the stock price differs substantially from his estimate, he can show his employer that he utilized the established procedure and shouldn't be blamed. Of course the established procedure can only hope to be accurate when evaluating long established companies in industries not facing disruption by new innovative competitors.
Nowadays, auto industry analysts themselves are facing a disruption that some of them are incapable of handling. Yet for some reason the financial firms that employ them allow almost all of them to keep their jobs. What's needed today by auto analysts is foresight and a highly developed intuitive sense of what is happening with a company and the industry. Some analysts are reluctant to try this, since if wrong, they may not be able to back up their estimates with math. Some others may not possess the required skills needed to meet the challenge. This becomes especially difficult when one of the auto companies they follow is also disrupting the petroleum industry and is developing an energy storage business that could disrupt the electric utility industry.
The short answer is that a firm's clients want a good estimate of how the market will price a stock a year from now (B), but some analysts simply grind the near-term numbers through a set formula in an attempt to "tell" the market what a stock "should" be worth (A). Methodology "A" makes its analysts worthless, since they are not truly addressing their clients' concerns.
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