I'm sure there will be plenty of Apple fans bashing Mr. Wu on this, but please keep in mind; Mr. Wu was one of the very bullish analysts throughout last year. This includes January this year, when AAPL sank 40%. Two weeks, ago, AAPL was looking at extremely rapid recovery, and at the end of a disastrous quarter for the US economy, it was just not prudent to expect Apple to beat the Street expectations by that much. Thus, Mr. Wu recommended caution (he didn't d 'Sell'; just 'Hold'). Having heard the very strong rumours about iPhone 3G in the weeks since, he can now comfortably recommend AAPL again without reservations.

Anyone who listened to Mr. Wu during last year would be swimming in AAPL profits by now. Last two weeks could have lost them no more than about 8%, compared to close to 100% gains in one year.

You're defending Wu but how can you defend someone who downgrades a stock on the eve of an earnings report that, in every way, looked like it would be showing extremelly strong results?

When you are an analyst, you analyse the company and the market. By market I mean customers of client's products, not the stock market. If (or should I say when?) you're not trying to manipulate the market, you leave it free to act on its own after you tell your customers how good a company/stock they have. That's what they should stick with doing, analysing the companies behind the stock.

Let me make it simple for you: you say invest or disinvest (in a certain stock) according to how strong or weak its company is going. Other than that, all that remains is worthy of crystal ball predicting, something analysts shouldn't do.

If Wu wanted to warn his clients of possible dangers coming from selloffs after Apple's Earnings Report, well he should have just done that: he should have issued a warning note telling clients they should beware of that possibility since that was what had happened in the 1st quarter. He would, nevertheless, be gambling a lot.

He didn't, he downgraded the stock in a very confusing note full of contradictions, saying there were lost of doubts about the company and the future of its products, "forgetting" about the 3G iPhone coming etc. etc.

I know Mr Wu has been all bulish about AAPL previously. Except maybe when in 2006 he invented rumors and then guided the market to offload AAPL stock because Apple was not meeting expectations HE HAD misleadingly CREATED!

What Mr Wu seems to have very straightforwardly done by downgrading AAPL in the eve of Apple's Earnings Reports is something called market manipulation.

He's now the mockery of the market and living proof of something most people have by now realised: that most analysts are useless and outright a disservice to their customers [but not to themselves].

He will keep analysing and predicting Apple's next moves but nobody in one's own mind will pay attention.

I regret it is so, I indeed enjoyed reading the reports on his forecasts. Who knows, maybe the man was under a lot of stress at the time or his family was being threatened at gun point and he had to do it anyway...