“Last week, Andy Zaky of Bullish Cross, representing a group of unpaid analysts who follow Apple in blogs, challenged the professionals who do it for banks and brokerage houses — and whom the bloggers claim are clueless,” Phillip elmer-Dewitt reports for Fortune.
Elmer-Dewitt presents a chart that details how the analysts fared and remarks, “What jumps out of the chart for me is how badly the pros blew the iPhone numbers: the Street consensus was off by an shocking 72%. It was here that the bloggers shone.”
“The prize for the most embarrassing call goes to Barclay’s Ben Reitzes for missing the iPhone number by more than 3 million units, followed closely by Merrill Lynch’s Jeff Fidacaro and Bernstein’s Tony Sacconaghi,” Elmer-Dewitt.
“Nobody got everything right, but considering how badly the pros misjudged iPhone sales and how close the unpaid analysts were on the other numbers, I have give this round to the bloggers,” Elmer-Dewitt reports.
See how the analysts did in the full article here.
I only trust Laura Goldman’s opinion…she’s probably dumb enough to have a smirk on her face now that AAPL is in half due to the GLOBAL ECONOMY…not Apple.
Funny. The analysts were all over the place. No surprise here. They often have an agenda to go along with their numbers.
“Nobody got everything right,”
They get it just right, but they just did not published they real findings, they are reporting what is best for Microsoft who is paying for all the FUD on apple. Remember the 300 millions on advertising???
Keep in mind the negative pressure on Apple like the $15,000 for an IT guy to write a positive article in favor of Vista vs Apple. Also, all the RIMM advertising dollars that will be lost if they push iPhone is killing Blackberry.
RIMM and Microsoft, reality sucks!
thats right assholes. read dem an’ weep
I have to say I am not that surprised. When I am on the bus or the train on the way to work, the number of iphones I see is amazing. I bought the 1st gen iPhone, and I certainly didn’t see it being used nearly as much.
Analysts are paid by their clients to predict, as accurately as possible, the path of a company, so that clients can make investment decisions before others do. Analysts have extremelyl strong motivation to get it as right as possible; if they don’t, the clients won’t trust them much. No amount of payola would sway analyst to lowball a company just because competitor is handing out some cash. It is not like the company would actually under-perform. As we can all see, all the analysts’ low predictions didn’t really damage AAPL; when the real numbers came out, AAPL shot up 14% in after-hours trading. They just cannot anyway. Those people who had good analysts got in on AAPL two weeks ago, when it was $86. The others, whose analysts predicted very low numbers, stayed on the side and missed the boat. They are getting on that boat now, but at $13 premium.
Perhaps all these analysts should read some blogs occasionally…
RIP …RIM..going going…..GONE….it is a mass grave and I am pretty sure RIM will land on the cold stiff long forgotten Palm.
Long live the Newton…which is what the iPhone really is. If you ever had one, you know what I mean. I drag my Newton out every so often and it STILL amazes me.
You fanbois will note I was closest on revenue. Apologies accepted.
The ANAL-ISTS blew it TOTALLY!!!! AS USUAL!!
And Apple’s stock price should be at $200 a share.
In light of Current Events™
How can anyone listen to any “analyst” ?
Adam Smith helps those who help themselves.
(hint, hint – means you have to do your own homework. A good start? That name up there if you don’t know who Adam is.)
BC
So analysts (paid or not) who look at dozens and dozens of companies fared worse than guys who focus on one specific company.
I see.
Most of these so-called analysts are overpaid and utterly useless…
The analysts are clearly no good at much of anything. They should be sacked and give the money from their salaries back to the shareholders.
Lets face it, if they were any good the current economic downturn would not have happened because the analysts would have identified the sub-prime market as fatally flawed years ago.
The Voice of Richard Sprague, Senior Marketing Director at Microsoft…
“I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone. Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.
What!?!? Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad). And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time. Will it do that?
So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008. Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.
I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago. I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building. So what did we do? We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”. Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.”
What is the opposite of prescient? Mmmm? Retarded?