The new king of Apple analysts
He's a Romanian blogger with a Harvard MBA who lives in Finland. Go figure. — Horace Dediu. Photo: Rami Salle — What if you took all the estimates by all the analysts who write about Apple (AAPL) — and there are dozens — and ranked them by how closely …
Context & Ripple Effects
Fortune's 2008 look inside Steve Jobs's inner circle treated Apple reporting as a matter of access; this follow-up flips the frame and scores outcomes instead, ranking every published Apple estimate by how closely it matched reported results.
On that measure the paper names an outsider the winner: Horace Dediu, a Romanian-born Harvard MBA writing independently from Finland, rated more accurate than the dozens of professional analysts covering AAPL — a credibility shift with no syndicated pickup beyond Fortune's own pages at this point.
First-order effects
- Dediu's independent analysis gains institutional validation, since his track record is now quantified against the entire sell-side covering Apple.
- Professional AAPL analysts face a published accuracy benchmark they did not set, making misses visible in a way quarterly notes previously were not.
Second-order effects
- Investors following Apple get a credible non-brokerage source for estimates, weakening the assumption that research value comes from trading-desk affiliation.
- Other independent Apple writers gain a template — publish testable numbers, let the record accumulate — that competes directly with traditional note-writing.
Third-order effects
- If accuracy-ranked coverage becomes the standard, equity commentary migrates toward open, scoreable models maintained by individuals rather than firms, pressuring how brokerages justify research budgets.
The trend: Coverage of Apple is shifting from credentialed brokerage notes toward independent analysts whose published estimates can be scored against actual results.