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To: Swordmaker
Besides, that silly profit share number was originally made up by Tavis McCourt at Raymond James (and there is really no good underlying data shown to justify his numbers, given that most smartphone manufacturers are not pure-play phone vendors and they don't generally break out their gross profit numbers). This is a guy who plugged Blackberry as a "Buy" all through a 50% plunge in the stock:

Jon Ehrlichman says: “Please correct me if I’m wrong but I was looking back over the Bloomberg and it says you’ve had an outperform rating on the stock since September 2008. That’s during period in which RIM has lost half its value while the S&P has fought its way back to even. Can you clarify that?”

Tavis’ response: “… No, that’s accurate… um… some stocks go up, some stocks go down.  They’ve done much better internationally than what I would have expected and much worse in the US.”

Betty Liu: “Right, but I think Jon makes a good point that you’ve had this outperform rating for a long time on RIM. What would it take to make you change that?”

Tavis: [now angry and somewhat dismissive of the direct criticism] “yeah yeah, look… this would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards…. But, we don’t… and, uh, and, uh, so… you know, I think what it would take would be if there was any meaningful slowing in RIM’s international growth.”

“This would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards.”   Well, Tavis, I think the point was that you’ve done a really bad job looking forward for over 2 years now.  And it’s not like he upgraded the stock and then back-tracked.  He just did nothing.  He kept saying RIM was an “outperform” for the entire ride down to a loss of half the company’s market value.  And now he says it’s still an “outperform.”  What is any investor supposed to make of that?

Why does this continue to happen?  Aside from no accountability, skewed incentives, and the basic personality types of the people who go into this line of work, there’s another factor at play.  According to Tavis’ bio on Morgan Keegan’s website, he covers 20 companies including RIM.  20!  How do you do that — really?  How can you intricately have an opinion about a company’s ups and downs amidst a rapidly changing competitive environment?  I think what Tavis did with RIM — which is exactly nothing in terms of changing his opinion — shows what happens.

The guy is throwing darts at the wall. He lucked out on his Apple recommendation. I wouldn't trust his "profit share" guesses any more than his Blackberry recommendation.
78 posted on 04/12/2015 4:41:25 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: Zhang Fei
Besides, that silly profit share number was originally made up by Tavis McCourt

No, it wasn't and hasn't been. It has been around for a long time. The current figures come from many sources who calculate it independently. BZZZT! They do NOT come from Tavis McCourt but from the Financial reports of the companies involved. Sorry, again you are wrong. They are not "Guesses."

I don't know what you think you proved with that long rambling cut and paste, but it said nothing about "profit share." You seem to think it is an arcane calculation or guess. It isn't. Total all the profits of all the companies making cellular phones for any specific period. . . calculate the percentage for each company of that total. Voilá, Profit Share. Some companies LOST money so the percentages can total more than 100%.

80 posted on 04/12/2015 5:03:30 PM PDT by Swordmaker (This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users contnue...)
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