Bloggers vs Financial Market experts

I've long felt that bloggers often know their fields better than the MSM journos who write about said areas, so this is very interesting - Vuru:

Wednesday was a great day. The so-called “amateurs” beat Wall Street’s finest by correctly predicting Apple’s (AAPL) reported earnings for their most recent quarter. And people are starting to take notice.

In a CNN Money list of the best (and worst) Apple earnings predictions, the bottom 20 spots (out of 41) were firmly occupied by the “professionals”. In fact, barring two bloggers, the bottom 30 were all analysts. The top 9 were individual investors.

Naturally, many people will be surprised by this and rightly so. It’s common sense to think that handsomely paid professionals who spend countless hours evaluating companies and who have the best investing tools in the world available to them would easily beat a few guys with a laptop and an internet connection.

But, the world is changing. Actually, to put it more accurately, the internet is changing the world. All you need is little more than a laptop, an internet connection, and a thirst for knowledge to outperform some of the best and brightest.

The fact that they were able to do this shouldn’t actually be all that surprising. Today’s individual investors have an unprecedented abundance of information, research, and tools at their disposal.

It was only 15 years ago that a self-directed individual investor had to pile through thousands of pages just to find potential investments. Now all it takes is a few clicks.

Combine this with the number of educational resources available and individual investors have a potentially lethal formula.

But is that enough for individuals to start leaving brokers and mutual funds?

Brokers and Funds are bad news anyway owing to management charges (which translate into bonusses), and I've long felt they often follow the herd when investing, ie by definition buying higher and selling lower than they should. But this really adds to the DiY investing story.