Again, they are paid to write their comments about Apple. That doesn't automatically make them more right than those who write counterpoint for free but someone thinks their views are valuable enough to pay them for them.
Leaving aside entirely the issue of observer bias (those who agree with me are right, those who don't are idiots), someone getting paid for their "analysis" seems to have remarkably little bearing on the accuracy of their public predictions, at least as far as most tech industry punditry goes.
Take, for example, any of the pundits or analyst groups making wild predictions about netbook sales in 2008 or 2009. You can find article after article--and reports that at the time were sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars to investors by said analyst groups--predicting skyrocketing sales of netbooks into the future, including very specific, hard numbers in some of the reports. None of them--not a single one--predicted that netbook sales by this year would be a big, fat zero. Few, likewise, even suggested that the two dominant OSes in five years would be made by Apple and Google, or that MS would be struggling in the rounding error category in most markets outside traditional PCs; the closest anyone got were some Linux predictions.
That's admittedly a single example, but it's an example of a broad range of professional pundits being spectacularly wrong. There are many, many more--pick a tech stock and look at a range of analysts, or pick an analyst and look at their range of tech stock recommendations. Either way I'm willing to bet that more often than not the predictions aren't at all impressive when they stray outside the blatantly obvious.
They're not getting paid to give you good advice, they're getting paid to talk a good game. (If they were so good at picking guaranteed stocks, they'd just spend all their time and money, you know,
actually trading them instead of telling other people what to do.) It's like compulsive gambling--so long as they hit occasionally, people will remember the big score and forget all the flubs. And really, if the stock market isn't compulsive gambling given a professional veneer, I don't know what it is.
And actually, in many cases, there's an active incentive for public stock pontificators to game the system if not outright lie now and then--if their private or personal fund will benefit from pumping something up by talking it up from their pulpit, why not? Jim Cramer, for example, was caught doing exactly the opposite with his own AAPL purchases of what he was recommending on the air, and he flat-out admitted to using his connections to professional analysts to pump-and-dump stocks:
"We had it down to a science in 1992: my wife would pick stocks that technically looked ready to go up, or she would keep track of merchandise to see what was down to tag ends. She would then generate a list of stocks that could move quickly on good news. Jeff would then go to work calling the companies to try to find anything good we could say about them. I would call the analysts to see if they were hearing anything. When we found a stock that looked ready technically to break out, or where the supply had been mopped up, and Jeff found something positive at the company, and I knew the analyst community didnt know anything positive, we would load up with call options and common stock and then give the good news to our favorite analysts who liked the stock so they could go do their promotion. That would get the buzz going and we would then be able to liquidate the position into the buzz for a handsome profit."
Probably best to wait for Apple to actually announce the real numbers.
