Subscribers may have noticed the scepticism with which we have tended to greet analysts’ forecasts for IBM Corp’s earnings, and invariably their forecasts have proved too optmistic – but it seems to take time for the true awfulness of the situation to sink in with them: the Wall Street Journal has called their bluff and […]
Subscribers may have noticed the scepticism with which we have tended to greet analysts’ forecasts for IBM Corp’s earnings, and invariably their forecasts have proved too optmistic – but it seems to take time for the true awfulness of the situation to sink in with them: the Wall Street Journal has called their bluff and finds that 12 of the 31 analysts that track IBM had buy recommendations on the stock on September 1 – and even after details of all the new cuts came out, only three had an outright sell recommendation on the stock, and on Tuesday morning, some were still rating it a buy; Why am I so stupid? asks Lehman Brothers’ Don Young, adding when asked where he stands on the stock now, I am under water; the most consistently bearish well he is a Brit – Stephen Smith of PaineWebber, says that until recently, saying you didn’t like IBM was like standing up and saying I don’t like apple pie; when asked why it had taken him so long to change his view of IBM, Joseph Payne at Alex Brown & Sons said abruptly that he had to take another call and promised to call back later; he didn’t, nor did he return a second Journal call.
