“It was a great story while it lasted,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “For nearly three years the professional sell-side analysts who cover Apple (AAPL) for the big banks and brokerage houses got clobbered every quarter by a motley group of amateurs — bloggers, day traders and individual investors who bet on Apple to beat the Street’s consensus and hadn’t been wrong yet.”

“But the indie’s luck ran out last October when they came in high and Apple came in low,” P.E.D. reports. “They beat the professionals one more time in December, scored a draw in April, then lost in July and once again last night.”

P.E.D. reports, “The big winner this quarter was Canaccord Genuity’s T. Michael Walkley, whose estimate for Apple’s bottom line ($9.67) was right on the money and whose forecast for iPhone unit sales (26.92 million) was pretty darn close (actual sales: 26.91 million).”

Find out how the other analysts, pro and amateur alike, did in the full article here.