Flutterby™! :

Interesting Salon article about Whisper Numbers, and how this relates to Whispernumber.com which takes amateur investor's data and insight. The whisper number is the real number bandied about Wall Street, and is usally off from the "analysts projections". When analyzing this sort of thing, of course the first thing you should do is look at the economic reasons for there to be two sets of numbers. Not that I'm suggesting anything about people with stakes in the markets who are giving information to others with much larger stakes in the markets, and why their answers might differ and be largely less correct than the numbers given by people who aren't looking at the bigger picture and are just tracking the data given out by the company...