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Technology Stocks : Creative Labs (CREAF) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis G. who wrote (8360)	1/16/1998 6:56:00 PM
From: Vanni Resta	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13925

Dennis wrote: "If somehow the consensus has suddenly dropped to 1.80 for 98 (and Zacks has somehow missed this), then these analysts would be saying that CREAF is only going to earn about 25 cents the next two quarters. Do you really believe this?" No, not at all. And I did not mean to suggest it. Apologies if anyone took it that way. I think what is happening here is that different services (and there are at least four of them) poll different subsets of all the analysts covering a stock, depending on the deals they can strike. And the differences are greater with international companies. The service providing the annual estimates I cited, for example, polls over 20 analysts, I believe I said before. Clearly many of them come in a lot lower than the Zack's group, bringing down the mean quite a bit. Usually, the differences in the means across services is not as large as in this case. You raise good points in your post, but this is all not necessarily very relevant. Yes, one could argue it will make a big difference, of course, when considering by how much the company "beats" estimates. But Wall Street is aware of the differences in the groups of analysts polled, and takes this into account. When it comes to revisions, of course, having the broadest subgroup of analysts possible is an advantage. Happy Investing! Vanni