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Humiliated by a bunch of bloggers, amateur analysts and assorted day traders

With revenues that grew 73% and earnings that more than doubled, Apple (AAPL) proved Tuesday that the fourth quarter results that so disappointed Wall Street last fall were a fluke. The company that Steve Jobs built is still that rare beast in American business: A $400 billion giant that acts -- and grows -- like a start-up.
Tuesday's results also revealed another fluke: The shellacking that our team of independent analysts suffered in October at the hands of Wall Street analysts with some of the worst track records in the business. (See Apple earnings smackdown: The bloggers got clobbered.)
This time, as evidenced by the preponderance of Wall Street blue on the bottom of the chart at right and the dominance of Indie green at the top, the order we had documented in more than half a dozen consecutive quarters was restored.

An example
If you invested money at the end of 1930 and withdrew it in 1950, the stock market would have returned about 2 percent a year after inflation and taxes. People who invested after the crash in 1929 in hopes of a quick rebound had to wait many years for their investments to pay off.
Average real annual return
Includes dividends, average taxes and fees. Adjusted for inflation.


This chart at right shows annualized returns for the S.& P. 500 for every starting year and every ending year since 1920 — nearly 4,000 combinations in all. READ ACROSS THE CHART to see how money invested in a given year performed, depending on when it was withdrawn.

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

We cheer for people who hit their own home runs in this country– not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:

It may be turkey week in America, but it's goose month in Germany. In many restaurants, you can get goose in your salad and goose in your soup to go with your goose entrée. Diners fairly honk their way through November.

But then, Germans have something to honk about. Germany's economy is the strongest in the world. Its trade balance - the value of its exports over its imports - is second only to China's, which is all the more remarkable since Germany is home to just 82 million people. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate - two percentage points below ours - is lower than at any time since right after reunification. Growth is robust, and real wages are rising.

It's quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.

Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports). Nor have German firms been slashing wages and off-shoring - the American way of keeping competitive - to maintain profits.