“Apple’s stunning fourth quarter, $18 billion in profits and $74.6 billion in revenue, was the best in the company’s history,” Suzanne O’Halloran writes for Yahoo Finance. “In fact, it was the best quarter any company has ever reported. Yet, the analyst community was caught off-guard. ‘It was pretty clear to anybody doing channel checks, or looking at the stores, they were selling a ton of this and Wall Street completely misses it,’ complained Barry Ritholtz, chief investment officer, at Ritholtz Wealth Management.”
“In his opinion, the reason is pretty simple. ‘I don’t think they [analysts] understand the relationship people have with their iPhones, iPads, Macs,” he declared to Yahoo Finance,” O’Halloran writes. “At the end of the day, we are all really Apple investors, even if you don’t own the actual shares. According to data from FactSet analyst John Butters, Apple’s blowout quarter accounted for just over 2.5 billion or 51% of the $5 billion increase in earnings for the S&P 500 index.”
“The maker of iPhones, iPads and Macs, notes Butters, is now the largest contributor to fourth quarter earnings growth for the S&P 500 at the company level,” O’Halloran writes. “Without Apple overall fourth quarter earnings would be nil.”
Read more in the full article here.
Idiocary.
… dickery, dok. 🙂
They don’t want to understand Apple, that’s all.
incapable too…
Apparently most analysts are too lazy to confuse their biased advice with facts.
Long ago they replaced facts with farts.
“If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit.”
He should have simply stopped after this ” “I don’t think they [analysts] understand” and fortunately for analysts the group they cater to is on par with them.
Typical “analysts” expect Apple to be predictable, because the industry they follow is largely predictable (except for Apple).
Is there any difference between an analysts or a weatherman? Or Punxsutawney Phil (which apparently has been right only 36% of the time)?
Or for that matter for most of the posters on this web site?
And just how many of our parents were correct on just how smart we were at the age of 5?
The only people that should be concerned about analysts’ reports are their bosses and the clients that use and rely on their services for better or worse.
And if we were all that smart, how is that our spouses call us idiots, assholes, etc., so much of the time? Or how many times did our mom’s ask/remind us to take out the garbage for pick up?
P.S., How many of us predicted the end of last nigh’t Super Bowl game? Even after the final whistle blew?
“The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially about the future.” — Mark Twain
I’m as tired of hearing analysis from investment pundits as I am tired of the mindless support for the company’s current CEO as most of you are tired of hearing from me. Just about everyone, except for the entrenched money managers who keep the price of AAPL about where it is because they don’t have confidence in the leadership of Tim Cook, get it all wrong. Until there is a solution to the restriction on the growth of AAPL, nothing – not record profits or all the rest of the hype – is going to matter.
Why do you enjoy being a troll. Fair question.
It is a fair question. Here’s a fair answer: I’m not a troll. I’m an original IIe owner who has bought just about everything the amazing company has ever made; an AAPL investor with huge profits; and devastated by the lost opportunity to have more and better products and more and better gains on my Apple Inc. stock. I am irrevocably convinced that a charismatic leader in the style of the genius of the company’s founder is needed to realize the full potential of changing the world over and over and making me a very happy customer and richer.
MDN posters such as yourself can keep calling me a troll but doing so just makes you look silly. If the only reason to come onto the MDN board is to blindly praise Tim Cook and the company as though he and it was as good as it should be is worse than trolling – it just makes Cook and his team complacent and the rest of us settling for less.
I don’t see your post as a troll, it is completely wrong and lacks any foundation to reality. However, it is most certainly not a troll.
The Analysts keep waiting for a repeat of the Mac / PC shift to happen in smart phones.
Unfortunately for them, they don’t realize that Apple fully analyzed what went wrong in the original Mac / PC episode. That’s why you see a much more vertical Apple these days, with the ability to engineer their own chips, moving to 64bit in total secrecy, and force road map changes with all of the ensuing chaos you would expect.
Developing key technologies (ie, fingerprint authentication) Apple is able to exploit and deny meaningful access to key components sue to their size and scale.
I believe Wall Street doesn’t want to believe in Apple and are probably hoping the company will fail. I know what I’m saying probably doesn’t make much sense, but they simply can’t be that stupid. Are they deliberately trying to make their clients lose money? Compare Apple to almost any stock around over the last five years and the company is really making an awful lot of money even if the share price doesn’t reflect it. How can Wall Street bet on Google and Amazon and just ignore Apple?
I’m no financial genius but holding and buying Apple since 2004 has given me incredible gains. I’m too conservative to just constantly try to trade hot stocks every quarter. I stuck with Apple because I like and use their products and the company has certainly has solid fundamentals. Everyone seems to love Netflix but I don’t see why. It looks to be far more of a risk than owning Apple but yet it has a huge institutional ownership. I realize Apple’s dependence upon iPhone sales but almost every company depends on one sterling product to carry it. Everyone says that’s Apple’s weakest link and maybe it is. It’s good until it goes bad. However, that can happen to almost any company you name.
I agree:
I bought APPLE Inc. in 1996, I will goto my grave owning AAPL
Make sure you enjoy some of it and not just your heirs.
thanks
Oh, i am enjoying my good fortune. spending very wisely.
There are too many stupid people on earth. And apparently I’m one of them because I bought into the whole apple is the best b.s., recommended them to everyone I know, then jobs jobs died, and apple went from it just works, to it just works for awhile, then we probably won’t fix it, we’ll just introduce new software that just works, for awhile, then we won’t fix it, and introduce new software that just works, for awhile, then we won’t fix it, and introduce new software. I’m So Happy the apple products I bought just worked, for under a year, till ios 8 came out, and apple continues to ignore the problems, and focus on something else because they don’t have enough money in the bank to make their advertised features just work, but hey, let’s give the company with what, closer to 200 billion in the bank a tax break. The government and apple. A match made in heaven. If the government and apple could get married, they’d do it every day, then get divorced every day, just so they could get remarried evey day and get the free gifts to “bank” everyday, then tell everyone…it just works, because we’re screwing over the consumer and profiting more in a day than the average joe makes in a year, now let’s get divorced so we can get remarried tomorrow and reap the rewards…apple high fives the government every morning when they wake up…everything is awesome…everything is cool when part of a corrupt team…everything is awesome.
If it sucks so bad, then go back to Windows.
Obviously you never enjoyed OS 8 in all it’s glory. Total piece of shit until they finally did some work on it.
If you had written, “There are too many stupid people on earth. And apparently I’m one of them.” and stopped there, you wouldn’t get any arguments from me.
In fact, I would have given you 5 stars.
Right on, Chad. A very few in the MDN world have this kind of insight and they will send you packing with name calling (“troll” is the favorite) as they blindly praise the poor leadership now driving Apple Inc. at the expense of what AAPL ought to be.
Look at all the typos above, that’s my awesome apple product just working.
So you are going to now blame Apple for your own intellectual collapse? Suggest you get back to Jeremy and record a few more mindless tunes.
I gather they don’t give you a sharp knife at the dinner table.
Uhhhh, Einstein, typos are cause by ure typing. If you type the word korrectly, it’ll be … uhhh … tiped correctly.