“Most professional analysts blew it in Q2, but you wouldn’t know it from their post-mortems,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Horace Dediu, who writes a blog called Asymco and was featured in this space last fall for the uncanny accuracy of his Apple (AAPL) earnings estimates, was beating himself up Thursday morning for missing the company’s Q2 2011 iPad unit sales number so badly. Even though his iPhone estimate was the best of the 48 analysts we polled and he missed Apple’s EPS by only 3 cents, he gave himself a B- for the quarter,” P.E.D. reports. “By Dediu’s exacting standards, few of the professional analysts who cover Apple for banks and brokerage houses got passing grades. Most, judging by the chart above, should be required to retake the course next semester.”
P.E.D. reports, “But you would never know it from the reports they sent to clients overnight. We scanned nearly two dozen and couldn’t find a single apology.”
Full article, with excerpts from the analysts’ morning-after notes, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Expectations should remain low when you take into account that the sole qualification for becoming a Wall Street analyst is getting hired as a Wall Street analyst.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
the proof is in the fudding
What a bunch of jerk-offs. If I could buy them all for their actual worth and sell them for what they think they are worth… I’d be richer than Slim, you know Carlos..
“Expectations should remain low when you take into account that the sole qualification for becoming a Wall Street analyst is getting hired as a Wall Street analyst . . .”
. . . by higher-up analysts whose sole qualification for becoming analysts was by getting hired as analysts.
Great take!
I wouldn’t expect an apology from analysts.
You are talking about the same group of people who helped drive the financial system to the brink of destruction and destroyed the lives and futures of many people all in the name of making a buck.
Apologize? They can do no wrong in their eyes and we are all below them.
You’d think that all the people whose 401ks, savings and investments got wiped out because they listen to these very same idiot analysts would know better than to listen to them again and again…
It’s not the quantity of information and advice, stupid, it’s the quality…
I prefer to abide by monkey’s predictions, which he makes by throwing darts at the stock page. He does better than most of the analysts, and costs less. Especially when bananas are in season.
whoops, by *my* monkey’s…
Perhaps the professionals knock 1K off every estimate just so AAPL wouldn’t get killed for “missing” if they were off… if the professionals are over, it can send the stock in a nosedive. Kind of like the price is right.
Note to HR departments on Wall Street. Time to set up interviews of the “amateurs” and severance packages for the “pros”.
No apology? But of course! These are ‘professionals’, and professionals never apologize! If they did, someone might catch on that they make this stuff up and deserve minimum wage for their services. And they wouldn’t want that! (0_o)
If these analysts were actually accurate, there would be (on average) as many stock SELL recommendations as BUY recommendations. But we almost always see far more BUY compared to SELL.
And they often “cop out” by using the HOLD recommendation instead of committing to a SELL. If a stock was a BUY, but it is no longer worthy of a BUY, then it should be a SELL. Surely, there must be something else to BUY instead, rather than HOLDing onto a stock that no longer rates a BUY. It should be BUY or SELL; HOLD just allows the analyst to be lazy and to NOT make a commitment.
For anyone who closely follows a particular company and its stock (like me for AAPL), analysts are generally worthless because I know a lot more than they do.
In medieval times, wizards to the King would throw bones, eviscerate goatss and read their intestine, stare into crystal balls and go into trances to predict future events.
How things haven’t changed, for the lazy.
If they could predict stocks so much better than any of us they’d all be retired investment millionaires out on their yachts, not schlepping to work everyday just to make up predictions.
“the sole qualification for becoming a Wall Street analyst is getting hired as a Wall Street analyst.”
I guess there are several criteria used to screen potential MDN contributors:
1) having an opinion on everything
2) being wrong more than half the time
3) a mom with an empty basement
I just slipped by…my mom’s basement is full of junk. Couldn’t move in if I wanted to.
Related:
“Expectations should remain low when you take into account that the sole qualification for becoming a politician is running and getting elected as a politician.”
Analysts attempt to explain what happened yesterday while guessing at what will happen tomorrow. There is little or no accountability for performance.
Their technical performance should be “graded” like students rather than basing their success on the amount of money that they bring in to the company from investors. Most of them are not even worth free, much less a fee.