“The Wall Street analysts who get paid to cover Apple (AAPL) got some things right,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Several predicted Apple’s total revenue for the second fiscal quarter of 2011 within a few hundred million dollars. And their tendency to underestimate Apple’s unit sales served them well in the iPad category,” P.E.D. reports. “But when it came to the number that matters most — the bottom line: earnings per share — it was the amateurs, once again, who nailed it and the pros who blew it.”
P.E.D. reports, “In our ranking of the best and worst analysts for Q2 2011, which lists them by how accurately they predicted Apple’s revenue and EPS, the amateurs took 13 of the top 15 spots. The bottom 32 spots were all held by professionals working for banks and brokerage houses. Taken as a whole, the numbers they sent their paying clients were off by a margin (11%) more than four times as big as those generated by the guys who do it for free (2.5%).”
Read more in the full article, including a full analysts’ report card, here.