I hope you remember not the current exceptions, but rather the rule: Many in Wall Street refuse to accept the fact that no reliable pattern can be discerned from past records to aid the analyst in predicting future growth. Even during the boom years of the 1990s, only one in eight large companies managed to achieve consistent yearly growth. And not even one continued to enjoy growth into the first years of the new millennium. Analysts can’t predict consistent long-run growth, because it does not exist.
