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Comment by yoseph | Hacker News Reader

Hi jhamburger, thanks for the comment!

I'm the author of the article and want to present a different perspective:

I don't think you're being completely fair to these guys. Sure, they're Apple enthusiasts but they're also digging significantly into the data to back up their analysis. For example, check out one users' analysis on Apple's Cost and Cost Ratios to Revenue: http://www.postsateventide.com/2010/11/apple-quarterly-compa... (Found here: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/forums/viewthread/79667/).

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OK so they're not guessing, but they're still biased. I'd like to see them correctly call a bad quarter before I'm convinced.

When was the last time Apple had a bad quarter? :-)

1997?

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/apple-posts-708-mi...

"The red ink just won't stop flowing from Apple Computer these days, as the company posted a tidy US$708 million loss this quarter. This is only one year after posting a $740 million loss in the same quarter of 1996. Apple said the loss contains a one-time $155 million charge for restructuring and a $375 million write-off to cover the acquisition of NeXT...

"We will return to profitability," said [CEO] Amelio, apparently to himself. Everyone else had stopped listening, except of course "MacWeek," which reported this story as "Company reports $1.6 billion in revenue." I guess that's one way to look at it"

(Fun fact: if you'd bought $10,000 worth of Apple shares in 1Q of 1997 they'd be worth eight hundred thousand dollars nowadays.)

Though I liked your comments in the article, I agree with jhamburger, this is a lot different than taking a random sampling of the popular finance bloggers and comparing their top picks vs. the top picks of analysts. You could still allow the bloggers to choose the companies they know best, but you would get more realistic picture of their investing prowess than the results here. That said, I very much agree with the 4 points you stated in the article.

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