The above pricing model for Google represents a new Technical Analysis – no not moving averages and Bollingers boundaries based on past patterns of pricing with no reference to products, marketing, or sales trends. Rather what Trefis does is provide a stock price modeling framework based on what markets a stock is in rather than an elaborate trendline of stock buyers sentiments for a particular stock, valuable in the short term as that may be.
What is even nicer about Trefis is the models are available for free. And, the big bonus is that users can not only customize almost all of the critical assumptions of the model; but also easily compare and discuss those changes with other users as they see fit. Given the recent horrendous showing by Wall Street financial analysts in predicting Apple’s recent blow out-quarter, perhaps a free stop by at Trefis is in order – where 97% of Trefis analysts were bullish on AAPL.
The downside to Trefis are 3:
1)they only follow about 100 stocks, most of them from the technology sector;
2)Trefis sets the model – so factors that you consider important may not be included. For example, for Sprint Nextel there is no way to predict the rate of adoption of Wimax; yet Sprint is betting big on Wimax success.
3)The actual model building is not a public process with an open API. If the Trefis people did this – Vaboom!
So if you look at technical/IT stocks [hear me AAPL, MSFT, IBM, etc analysts?], you might want to pay attention to Trefis.
What a difference! No longer looking at the tea leaves of the past but oriented toward future trends for a company