Amateurs trump pros in predicting Apple's fantastic financial quarter

Now that Apple's 1st quarter financial performance has been revealed, it's time to revisit predictions made by amateurs and pros alike. Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt did just that, and found that the novices out-guessed several high-priced heavyweights.

Fortune has a system to rank the best and worst Apple analysts, measuring how accurately their predictions were across seven categories:

1. Revenue

2. Earnings

3. iPhones sold

4. iPods sold

5. Macs sold

6. iPads sold

7. Gross Margins

Of those, the unaffiliated analysts took the revenue, earnings, gross margins and unit sales categories. Conversely, the bottom 20 spots were held by folks working for brokerage houses and banks. Among the latter was Needham's Charlie Wolf, who missed the number of iPads sold by more than 2 million units. In Wolf's defense, none of us would have guessed that Apple would sell a staggering 14.8 million units.

On the other side of the equation, Turley Muller at Financial Alchemist missed Apple's earnings by one penny, and Traderhood's Nicholas Mihalache was off on iPad sales by 0.76 percent. Clearly, they are clairvoyant.

Congratulations for the sharp observers who rocked these numbers, and to Apple for giving them something to crow about.