Thursday, July 09, 2009

Pixar Movie Beats the Analysts

To try and slam any Wall Street analyst at this time is obviously to come to the party while the tables are being cleared. My only hope would be that Wall Street technical analysts would by now have had some decency to be more humble and less hubristic about forecasts of whatever nature. And yet it appears that they have continued to give aggressive forecasts and made calls that gullible investors take seriously, or not.

This article from the NYT reports about Richard Greenfield a celebrated analyst has had to eat humble pie after making a forecast on the movie Up. To my mind, the admission is still qualified by the statement that the single movie's success does not mean that Disney will do well all around. That in my view is a more reasonable statement than the crunching of numbers and technical analysis stating how much a movie will gross. With respect to the training and professional capability of Mr. Greenfield and other analysts, they do not always understand businesses that they pontificate about as well as the managers of those businesses do. And the moral of this story is that it should be fine for a professional to say, "I do not know" as opposed to presenting dubious forecasts. Leave that to witchdoctors.

Still, I am curious about what the revenue forecasts from Epagogix would be for this movie.

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