“There’s almost nothing good to say about the estimates published by professional analysts in advance of Apple’s (AAPL) second quarter earnings,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “Not only did the pros badly underestimate almost every aspect of the company’s business — from revenue and earnings to unit sales — but they were bested in every category by a rag-tag group of bloggers, day traders and armchair analysts.”
Elmer-DeWitt reports, “Special mention goes, once more, to Turley Muller, who writes an occasional blog called Financial Alchemist. Not only did he outperform the pack this quarter — scoring four greens and a light green — but this is the sixth straight quarter in a row that he’s done it… Daniel Tello has used our chart to rank the analysts by how far they were off, with Muller on top (5.9%) and [Citigroup’s Richard] Gardner on the bottom (14.3%). According to Tello’s calculations, the amateurs as a group were off by 7.7%; the pros were off by 11.6% — 51% worse.”
Full article, with chart showing how the Apple analysts performed, here.
When will investors get the ANAL in analysts?
Analyst == paid to guess
Remember it was the so-called ‘pros’ who engineered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They are the root of most of our financial problems. Worthless goobers!
Didn’t NPD state apple will not beat their estimates and drove the stock down?
He beat everybody on the Street for years legally while a Fund Manager at Fidelity & later wrote a book.
The book says you, as an individual investor, should stick to businesses and industries you have knowledge of to make smart & informed choices. I guess this proves him right again.
It’s like ten years ago, when you couldn’t be fired as an IT “pro” by recommending Windows (and twenty years ago IBM). The “amateurs” could push Mac OS and not risk their jobs.
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Well, the “pro” financial analysts can’t get fired by being “too low” with Apple. The “amateurs” are taking no risk (except with their own money).
The pros tend to cover multiple companies, and have their jobs on the line. The amateurs know everything there’s to know about a company they like/love, and only their own assets are on the line (assuming they actually follow their own advice and invest).
A new day has dawned: Kathy Huberty was not last on the list!
I think it was IDC that lowballed Apple’s Mac numbers.
@Predrag
The fact that a monkey with a dart board can pick stocks better than “experts” 40% of time proves that the ANALysts are morons.
The whole “street” industry is full of crooked people stealing honest people’s money. We need to jail them all. We can start with the clown prince of investing Cramer.
just my $0.02
Turley Muller didn’t even update his blog this past quarter. Did he post his forecast elsewhere?
Analyst/Consultant – takes the watch off your wrist to tell you the time.
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I was at a meeting of “semi-pros” last night when someone mentioned that AAPL was “still trading”. So I checked. !W!O!W!
Up ~$19.50 in heavy trading! Mentioned that. One of the others said “must have been Bad News”. No, Good. “It will drop by this morning then … AAPL trades weird.” Which I agreed with, but said nothing. It lost $5 by the morning, ~$15 is still nothing to sniff at.
So much for the Wallstreet analyst hegemony. Day traders beware. Your mother-in-law could do better.
Analysts are wrong? Noooooo
@Mugwump- My forecasts were posted at Fortune (Apple 2.0) leading up to the earnings announcement.