Wall Street Watch Friday: This Company Made the Analysts Look Silly

It's pretty common to see a company beat analyst targets. It's another thing entirely to watch a company completely obliterate Wall Street's forecasts.

Analogic (ALOG) blew past the prognosticators on Thursday after the market close. The medical imaging and aviation security technology specialist saw its fiscal fourth quarter revenue climb 12% to $151 million. That may not seem like much, but the market was only holding out for a 4% top-line uptick.

Things get even more refreshingly surprising on the way down the income statement. Analogic's profitability more than doubled to $0.96 a share. Wall Street was only forecasting net income of $0.71 a share.

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The market was rightfully surprised. Analysts had actually come up short in two of the company's three prior quarters. There didn't seem to be any reasons to expect a blowout quarter out of Analogic. Budget-strapped hospitals have been stingy in their expenditures and it's not as if there were any recent commercial airplane disasters to trigger a run on the company's computed tomography systems that detect checked baggage for explosives.

There's nothing like humbling the Wall Street professionals modeling your financial performance.

Other Things Worth Watching

• Sometimes you have to put the "stop" in stop-motion animation. Disney's (DIS) CFO revealed that the family entertainment giant would be booking a $50 million charge for shutting down a film that was currently in production. Speaking at an investor conference on Thursday afternoon, Jay Rasulo said that the company's new studio chairman made the call to nix the project being helmed by the director of Coraline. Disney has taken bigger charges for completed films in the past after John Carter and Mars Needs Moms bombed at the box office last year.

• Reactions may have been mixed with Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 5 announcement on Wednesday, but that didn't stop the stock from racing to new all-time highs late on Thursday. Despite plenty of exciting features and long overdue upgrades, some fans were let down that the larger four-inch screen is still smaller than some of the more popular Samsung Android smartphones. Apple also didn't go with the trendy NFC chips that make it easier to swap data and complete transactions. It won't matter to true Apple fans, though. They'll be lining up to buy the new phone when it hits stores next Friday.

Motley Fool contributor Rick Munarriz does not own shares in any of the stocks in this article, except for Disney. The Motley Fool owns shares of Walt Disney and Apple. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Apple and Walt Disney. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended creating a bull call spread position in Apple.