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How wrong were AAPL analysts about today’s share price?

It’s not unusual to carry out short-term evaluations of the accuracy of predictions made by AAPL analysts. PED30, for example, does a quarterly roundup of the AAPL earnings predictions made by a range of analysts, then ranks them afterwards by their accuracy …

But that’s only testing the performance of analysts over 1-2 days. Since they give AAPL target prices for 12 months ahead, why not look back a year and see how close they got to today’s price?

That’s the suggestion made by Asymco analyst Horace Dediu, who collated the year-ago predictions of 27 analysts. There seems to be a typo in his tweet, as he says the current price is about $420 instead of $460. I guess that’s like that law of the Internet, which says any post pointing out an error in someone else’s grammar will itself contain a grammatical error.

Did anyone get close to $460? Nope. Not even vaguely.

Even noted Apple bull Katy Hubert of Morgan Stanley only had a target of $247, and Wedbush’s Daniel Ives – who regularly gives both best-guess and best-case figures – was slightly lower at $245.

The closest anyone got was Tom Forte of DA Davidson, with $270. Most of the other outperform/overweight predictions were in the $240-250 range.

Of the 27 analysts shown, 13 of them – almost half – were out by a factor of two or more. As Dediu noted, Rosenblatt’s Jun Zhang was out by a factor of three.

You can see the full list on Dediu’s tweet, below.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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