Showing posts with label MSN Money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MSN Money. Show all posts

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report somewhere the correct trailing P/E ratio, in some cases they still quote a wrong P/E (perhaps derived from their outdated financials) on a different section of the site, or even on the same page.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.