(Cut n paste of my comment from PED’s blog on CNN)

The Q4 2011 “miss” made me look long and hard at where I, the analysts, and the bloggers went wrong.

It all comes down to a single data point – listen to Peter Oppenheimer! Always! He telegraphed in no uncertain terms that they would come in light, guiding $5.50.

For this Q just in he did the same – he was shouting it out loud and clear that it would be a monumental quarter, guiding at $9.30.

Looking at (thanks PED!) the historical (back to mid 2006) beat over guidance, we get a range of 19 to 61%. At guidance of $9.30, and using the lowest beat of 19%, we get $11.07, a full dollar over Street consensus. Using the upper third, or a 50% beat, we get almost exactly the actual result of $13.87. And FYI, that “miss” was still a 28% beat of their own guidance.

The analyst who predicted that Apple would miss their *own* guidance should be fired on the spot.

This range is golden, and Oppy’s guidance is everything. The only fiddling that we, the investing public, need do is to gauge whether it was a good or great quarter and accordingly adjust where on the 19 to 61% range we should be sliding the needle.

So, heads up for next Q. At guidance of $8.50 we arrive at an EPS range of $10.11 to $13.69. Don’t let anybody say we weren’t all warned in advance!

EPS 13.87$
Rev. $46.33B
GM 44.7%

iPhone 37M
iPad 15.4M
Mac 5.2M
iPod 15.4M

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/22/thorsten-heins-to-take-over-as-rim-ceo-as-mike-lazaridis-jim-balsillie-step-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NP_Top_Stories+%28National+Post+-+Top+Stories%29

It’s amazing it took this long. But, it’s too little, too late.

This is the one weekness that Apple has. They have not needed PR until now, but now they need it. And they need to take a lead on this issue. These jobs ARE gone, but industry isn’t. Apple is the one cpany that uses this supply chain to the best advantage. Other companies use it to build race-to-the-bottom engines.

Sadly, we’re no longer a manufacturing nation, so we will fumble with this issue before we can understand it. Henry Ford wouldn’t know would be stunned at how we’ve changed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html

In my December Quo Vadis post I argued for DJIA go higher in January. You can see it here. Since then DJIA is up 338 points (2.75%)

http://www.traderhood.com/2011/12/27/quo-vadis

Gold behaved as I expected too. It rose above the it’s 1,600 resistance and is hanging at 1,658 at a moment. Gain of 3.62%.

EUR was real slow to gain as it was pounded daily with negative rhetoric in financial periodicals. On top of it S&P downgraded almost every European country with exception of Germany (and Slovakia) and Fitch is daily fear mongering the news with Greek default. In spite of all of that EUR finally started to gain and was able to bounce off the lows of 1.2623 and make 4 day uninterrupted bullish run to 1.2971. This is the first time since the beginning of November 2011 it was able to finish full uninterrupted stochastic upswing on dailies. Not even the S&P downgrade of the “whole” Europe could push it lower.

That said, I think EUR will get a short breather here before it can continue higher. I’ll be watching how far it will retrace now that stochastic on dailies is at 80%. A lot of the EUR will be again influenced by media, but my guess is now that it has been able to do full stochastic bounce, it will not retrace more than 50% and I will be increasing my EUR positions on resistance breakouts.

Both DJIA and gold seems to be slightly on overbought side and I would expect both of them to pull back a bit with DJIA having support at 12,250 and gold having support around 1,620.

AAPL is technically at overbought levels and I think a lot of the earnings news is already priced in upfront. Unless Apple posts totally unexpected (higher than any expectation) earnings, there will be the “buy rumor – sell news” pullback after the announcement.