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To: L. Adam Latham who wrote (79072)	4/14/1999 2:57:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 186894

Adam, To the best of my knowledge, NOBODY reports consolidated revenue forecasts. They are done by the individual analysts and may or may not be formally published. Nobody's focuses on gathering this kind of data because up until recently it wasn't a major focus. That's changing, as things on Wall Street will tend to do from time to time. (I can recall when analysts still published forecasts for return on assets, and used them to drive markets.) Incidentally, if you look back a few years, you'd see that this change is not particularly unique. A few years back "earnings momentum" was the measure everybody drove to. That moderated into simple "earnings growth." Now, more and more analysts are focusing on "revenue growth." Next year it'll probably be something else, and there's no guarantee that anybody will necessarily be set up to report a simple, single, consolidated number for any of the above. That's reality. The market is made up of millions of different people making millions of different decisions based on millions of different pieces of information and their theories about them. I don't believe that IBES or anybody else can distill all that into one number which represents an overall consensus of what is expected. All you can do is read everything that's available and hope for enough datapoints to come up with a good conclusion. My reading of multiple reports tells me that the general analyst expectation was for revenue of about 7.5b (a term I've also heard tossed around in the press this morning). Of course, I've often been drastically wrong, which is why I tend to like to just buy good companies and hold them rather than trying to interpret every move every day. mg