Whisper Numbers Losing Credibility
from the ignore-them dept
We first mentioned the popularity of "whisper numbers" back in 1999 and had another article about them a year ago. Of course that was back when people still had money to invest in the market. It was also back then that those numbers were useful. Now, a new study has come out showing that whisper numbers these days are less accurate than official analyst predictions. Of course, what this probably all means is that no one ever had any idea what earnings really were going to be like, so sometimes institutional expectations will be better, and sometimes whisper numbers will be better. These days you might be better off with a random number generator.
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Q2 2001 Whisper Numbers results
It was the season of earning warnings, but so-called whisper numbers were still able to overwhelmingly pull in more accurate numbers than analysts who were constantly adjusting their numbers. GetWhispers.com examined 284 technology stocks, each company having a minimum market capitalization of $1 billion on June 29, 2001. For 28 stocks (9.86%), analysts' consensus estimates for the quarter were closer to the actual earnings. For 114 stocks (40.14%), GetWhispers' numbers were closer. For the remaining 142 stocks (50.00%), the variance from actual earnings for both estimates and whisper numbers was the same. For the third quarter in a row, GetWhispers discovered that investors seemed more capable of anticipating earnings results. A complete list of the results for all 284 companies is available upon request at webmaster@getwhispers.com
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