With Apple’s final results for fiscal 2015 due out Tuesday afternoon, estimates by the hundreds are pouring into Estimize, a four-year-old experiment in what founder Leigh Drogen calls “social finance.”
Each quarter, more than 12,000 armchair analysts send Estimize their quarterly estimates—top and bottom lines—of 1,500 public companies, from Agilent to Zipcar. But no stock draws more attention than Apple. As of Monday morning, 767 mostly anonymous amateur analysts had submitted their best guesses for Apple’s fourth-quarter revenue and earnings. Drogen expects that number to pass 1,000 by close of market Tuesday.
The amateurs’ guesses are all over the lot, as indicated by the height of the light blue rectangles in the chart. But there is wisdom in the crowd. Last quarter, Estimize was closer to the actual results than Fortune’s collection of pros and independents, separately or combined. Our panel’s consensus for revenue and EPS are represented in the attached charts as the purple dots labeled “Your Estimate.”
We’ll find out who was closer to the mark after the markets close Tuesday.
I’ll be monitoring the earnings results, and you can too. Apple’s conference call with analysts will be webcast live starting at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT). Click here to tune in.
Below: The estimates and Apple’s actual earnings per share (EPS) over the past nine quarters.
Click to enlarge.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.You can also subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.
