“One of the mysteries that lingers from Apple’s most recent quarterly report — when the company failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations and its stock suffered its worst one-day loss in four years — was whether the analysts who set those expectations were aware that the quarter was one week shorter than the same quarter a year earlier,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Apple, like many retail firms affected by weekend sales, defines its fiscal quarters not as three months, but as 13-week periods,” P.E.D. reports. “To compensate for the resulting shortfall of one or two days a year, the company adds an extra week every fifth or sixth year (depending on the number of leap years in between) — giving it 7.7% more selling days in the long quarters and 7.1% fewer in the short.”
P.E.D. reports, “Is it possible that professional analysts paid to study the world’s most valuable company were unaware of something so material to their forecasts? As it happens, this is a familiar issue in academic circles.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, don’t be so easy on those Apple analysts, P.E.D. – a significant number of them are both.
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