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.
@philiped Rather than publishing current analyst price targets why not publish the targets from a year ago and the percent error? Here is what some of the Apple analysts were predicting it would be today. The $AAPL price is about $420 now. In one case the price is 3x the target. pic.twitter.com/hfeHsUh1TY
— Horace Dediu (@asymco) August 17, 2020
