There are any number of ways to take stock of the overall impact of a securities class action settlement. But one of my favorites is having a look at what Wall Street has to say about the ultimate outcome.

In the case of the $1.21 billion dollar settlement Valeant Pharmaceuticals reached with investors, the number beat analyst expectations, especially since the company only had $825 million in cash on-hand at the time the deal was announced in late 2019. Plaintiffs accused the company, which caught flack from lawmakers in the middle of the last decade for buying up old drugs and raising their prices, of forming a secret network of captive pharmacies to artificially inflate sales to fraudulently prop up the company’s stock price. Both Guggenheim Securities and Bloomberg Intelligence said the settlement amount was larger than anticipated. Wells Fargo went a step further saying that “the settlement amount is much larger than Street expectations.”