“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.]