Have you discovered Trefis yet? I've been having a lot of fun playing with it and find it very useful to help me sort out the real impact of some of the information I see making headlines for different companies.

It helps you really get a sense of how a company's products impact its stock valuation.

Trefis is led by a group of MIT engineers and Wall Street analysts. They take extensive financial data and develop a graphic display that shows you what drives the value of a company's business.

For example, the Trefis price estimate for Apple is $502. On the graph you can see that about 50% of Apple's stock value comes from iPhones. iPad is closer to 10%, while the iTunes business is under 5%.

The powerful part is that Trefis lets you play with assumptions, or try scenarios, and see what effect they might have on the valuation of a company.

For example, if you think the iPhone market share might grow faster or slower than they do, you can drag a line on a graph up or down and you can instantly see that might affect Apples valuation.

Want to try it yourself? You can get to Apple quickly using this link:

Trefis Apple Analysis

You'll find lots of other companies to play with once you get to their site.

It's fun! Let us know if you try it. What did you come up with as a Valuation for Apple and why?

--
Laurie Frederiksen
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