Wall Street

Pros vs. Indies on Apple's Q2 2012: A $6.8 billion gap

The difference in their quarterly forecasts has never been so great

In the three and a half years that I've been pitting the analysts who cover Apple (AAPL) for Wall Street against the growing cadre of independent analysts who do it for fun (and, presumably, their own profit), I've never seen a gap this big -- either in dollar or percentage terms.

According to Thomson/First Call, the published consensus of 42 professional analysts MORE

Wall Street raised its Apple estimates 24.4% in 90 days

But even at $600 a share, the company's stock price still seems out of whack

Apple's (AAPL) second fiscal quarter ends Saturday, and although the market spent Friday morning knocking the stuffing out of its share price (Apple fell back below $600 in mid-morning trading), Wall Street remains bullish on Tim Cook's company.

How do we know? We've watched the analysts' Q2 estimates for Apple climb more than 24% in the past MORE

Asymco: Can the iPad sustain 150% yearly growth?

There is a precedent: iPhone sales have doubled, on average, every year since 2007

The chief difference between the independent analysts who follow Apple (AAPL) and their counterparts on Wall Street is that the independents put a premium on being right.

The professionals, with all due respect, seem to care more about not over-promising or straying too far from the consensus. (See here, here and here, for example.)

So investors who want informed MORE

Did Apple's cash finally burn a hole in its pocket?

We'll find out Monday, one half hour before the market opens

Tim Cook has scheduled a conference call for 9 a.m. EDT Monday to answer the question Wall Street has been asking -- repeatedly, and with increasing insistence -- for years: What does the company plan to do with its enormous stockpile of cash and marketable securities, worth just under $100 billion as of the last quarterly report.

Mr. Market will be MORE

Apple's share price overtakes Wall Street's 12-month targets

As of Wednesday morning Morgan Stanley's and Oppenheimer's were under water

Most sell-side Apple (AAPL) analysts are conservative in their earnings estimates but bullish in their price targets. According to Thomson/First Call, the Street high target this week is $700 and the median is a dollar short of $600. (The independent analysts are even more optimistic; the biggest number we've seen is Robert Paul Leitao's $790.)

But with Apple topping $525 in heavy MORE

What's the point of those Apple price targets?

Like the tortoise in Achilles' footrace, they may be perpetually unreachable goals

"There's scant evidence that the stock market itself has paid much if any attention to analysts' price targets in recent years," writes Needham's Charlie Wolf in a note to clients Thursday that raises his own Apple (AAPL) target $80 to $620.

He's got a point. the average target among the two-dozen analysts we sampled on October 19, the day after Apple's MORE

Video: Grading the Apple analysts on a scale of A to F

Two ways of seeing how well (or badly) the pros and amateurs predict Apple's earnings

We've been trying for several years to find the best way to show how much better the so-called amateur analysts (some of whom have since gone pro) are at estimating Apple's (AAPL) quarterly revenue and earnings than the Wall Street professionals who do it for the big banks and brokerage firms.

Now Asymco's Horace Dediu, who is MORE

Wall Street raises its Apple estimates, but not high enough

Apple's earnings grew 116% in Q1. So why is the Street is looking for 44% in Q2?

After Apple (AAPL) blew past everybody's expectations on Tuesday, reporting sales up more than 73% and earnings up nearly 116%, analysts up and down Wall Street rushed to revise their spreadsheets and issue new notes to clients. We got our hands on 39 of them -- plus a note from one analyst that his MORE

A guide to Apple's guidance

What to make of those pesky forward-looking statements in today's earnings report

It used to be that traders rewarded or punished Apple's (AAPL) shares right after its earnings releases based not on the sales it reported for the past quarter, but on what the company said about the quarter to come. Apple tends to "guide conservatively," in the jargon of the trade, which Wall Street often interpreted as a disappointment.

But that MORE

Can Apple still deliver an earnings surprise?

The 18% gap between the Street's estimates and the independents' suggests that it can

Last fall, a Wall Street analyst who shall remain nameless suggested in a note to clients that the days of the big Apple (AAPL) earnings surprises may be over.

He was referring to the string of quarterly reports in which the company beat the Street's estimates by measures so wide they were (or should have been) an embarrassment MORE