Philip Elmer-Dewitt on the fact that the fourth calendar quarter of 2012 was a week shorter than last year’s:

Yet of the three dozen Wall Street analysts we polled in advance of last month’s earnings report, only a handful mentioned the short quarter. Those who failed to take it into account, of course, would tend to underestimate revenues in the long quarter (i.e. fiscal Q1 2012) and overestimate them in the short (Q1 2013).

Is it possible that professional analysts paid to study the world’s most valuable company were unaware of something so material to their forecasts?

Yes.

Thank you for playing.