Sunday, April 4, 2010

Ten weeks later, AAPL numbers elude financial web sites

Closing in on ten weeks since Apple's last report where they "cleared up" any confusion about accounting rules, most financial sites still show incorrect data on their profiles for Apple.

So what the f**k is AAPL's P/E??

Turns out I was being unfair to Yahoo! in singling them out. This is a generalized industry problem and not exclusive to a few bad sites. Out of the 16 major sites I looked at (2 good ones submitted by readers), only 7 have managed to update their historical financials with the retrospective amendments freely available from Apple's Investor Relations site. Even though 11 do report somewhere the correct trailing P/E ratio, in some cases they still quote a wrong P/E (perhaps derived from their outdated financials) on a different section of the site, or even on the same page. Finally, a couple of sites have simply stopped providing analysts estimates for Apple (Forbes and Yahoo!).

Here's a table with all the sites and data I checked.

Site ttmEPS P/E Fncls Ests
----------- ------ ---- ----- ----
Forbes $ 8.17 28.9 Wrong N/A
CNN Money N/A 28.9 Wrong Ok (incorrect expectations history)
SmartMoney $ 8.17 28.9 Wrong Ok
Nasdaq $ 8.17 28.9 Wrong Ok
Zacks $ 8.17 28.9 Wrong Ok
Yahoo! $10.27 23.0 N/A N/A Ok! (fixed as of 4/15, 11 weeks later!)
CNBC $10.25 23.0 Wrong Ok
FOXBusiness $10.25 22.7 Wrong Ok
MarketWatch $10.25 23.0 Wrong Ok
Google $10.25 23.0 Ok N/A
Reuters $37.33? 23.0 Ok Ok (missing March quarter!?)
MSN Money $10.25 23.0 Ok Ok
Scottrade $10.25 23.0 Ok Ok
Fidelity $10.24 23.0 Ok Ok
Ameritrade $10.25 23.0 Ok Ok (excellent tool!)
ft.com $10.25 23.6 Ok Ok

Please add links in the comments for any other financial research site's flawed Apple numbers, or to let me know if any of these have fixed theirs.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

AAPL P/E at Scottrade = 23.0
Apr 5 nearly 1 a.m.

Tetrachloride

Daniel Tello said...

Thanks Tet! Looking at the other info on scottrade.com it seems their data is correct, although Ameritrade's estimates tool offers much more info.

$10.25 ttmEPS, 23.0 PE, restated financials, and up-to-date analysts estimates. I'm adding these to the table.

Anonymous said...

Any comments on the launch? Apple is saying 300K+ but the analysts were saying 700K (up from their originally accurate estimates)

Daniel Tello said...

Anon, 300K+ is about inline with what the pre-orders were saying. Up to when Apple pushed deliveries until next week my published estimate was 240K units, including about 30% of those being 3G models. That leaves about 170K for delivery on Saturday. Assuming a similar amount of reservations gives 340K. I don't think BBY had more than 10K, and unreserved in-store purchases are probably even less.

When you state "but the analysts were saying 700K" of course you mean "the analyst." This 700K number (the high-end of one single analyst with a reputation of gutsy overly bullish predictions) is anything but consensus. This morning I saw two reports (Barclays and Bernstein) saying around 400K for the weekend, not just for Saturday (Sunday shouldn't make much of a difference anyway). I'm sure there were others that I missed.

Anonymous said...

Fidelity: $10.24 ttm EPS (as of 12/31/09)
PE (ttm): 23.04 (as of 4/1/10)
Current Consensus EPS Estimate: $2.39
Total Rev (ttm): $46.71B

Anonymous said...

Thanks Deag. Glad to know my broker is accurate! Thanks for all your analysis.

pk de cville said...

AS OF NOW, none of the error prone sites at the top of your list has corrected themselves.

FORBES, CNN MONEY, SAMRTMONEY, NASDAQ, ZACKS

Since this is Apple that they haven't corrected in nearly 3 months, what does this say for their accuracy across the board?

(Their Current EPS multiplier is 29.1!)

Daniel Tello said...

Analyst estimates now available at Yahoo! Hope it lasts...