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somewhere the correct trailing P/E ratio, in some cases they still quote a wrong P/E (perhaps derived from their outdated financials) on a different section of the site, or even on the same page.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

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

Not just the P/E. It's mainly the ttm EPS, but also the real historical growth rate, all the financials, even analysts estimates are missing. I mean, come on, it's been 10 days since the report. What a mess.

Wasn't the internet supposed to be the realm of immediately updated information available to all for free?

What's the point of having Yahoo! Finance, Capital IQ, or even Thomson-Reuters services for that matter, keeping track of companies and estimates for the public, when they happily publish erroneous data for days or weeks and no one can do anything about it?

Does anyone even care? Where's the f**king SEC?

Updates:

Yahoo! data still a mess. See http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ae?s=AAPL

Let them hear it using this form (make reference to ticket number 3385526).

It's been three four six seven! weeks since the report and yahoo's still a mess. Anyone, how do we fix this:

Well, it took them seven weeks, but they finally did it!

And they f'd it up again! Amazing. Eight weeks now.

And now it's good again, hopefully for more than two days. Two months to fix this...

And it's bad again. More than 9 weeks. Got tired of updating so here's a day counter for this.

Fixed! Good job, Yahoo! Finance, despite the 11 weeks your users were in the dark. Unfortunately, some who might have wanted to jump in at $190 are now looking at $247. Not to worry Yahooers, it's still going to double in a year or two.

Apple Investor Relations: No word yet on accounting change

Not yet...

I'm not too surprised by this. My impression is that Apple would want to make the change when there's the least impact on financials. This would be either Q2 or Q3. I predict they'll announce the change towards the end of Q2, so both their next report (Q2) and their next guidance (Q3) are minimally affected.

Accounting changes?

By the way, this just in (not the greatest scoop but I thought I'd share anyway):