“When Apple’s (AAPL) shares responded to the news out of the company’s developers conference by closing the week at $325.90 — their lowest level since last December — I thought I’d take a look at how last Friday’s stock price compared with the 12-month price targets Wall Street’s analysts posted exactly one year earlier, after the conference that introduced the iPhone 4,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
I dug out a dozen analyst’s reports issued on June 7 and 8, 2010, expecting to find numbers that were wildly off the mark,” P.E.D. reports. “To my surprise, the 12-month price targets neatly bracketed the stock’s current price. They ranged from a low of $287 to a high of $350, with a mean of $322.33 — just a few dollars off Friday’s close.”
“Where the analysts seem to have gone off the rails last year is in the price-to-earnings multiples on which they based their predictions. To calculate their price targets, they multiplied Apple’s estimated earnings by factors that ranged from 16 to 22.5,” P.E.D. reports. “When Apple more than delivered on those estimates — growing earnings 74.6%, 67.5%, 75.2% and 92.2%, respectively, over the next four quarters — two things happened: 1) the run on Apple’s stock price came to a halt, and 2) the analysts cut their multiples.”
P.E.D. reports, “When we asked these 12 analysts to explain the discrepancy, the four who responded all gave the same answer: ‘multiple compression.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]