So what he'd do is deliberately lower Wall Street expectations so that Apple could just

utterly blow them away each quarter to do this just repeatedly and it's amazing that

he could keep lowering expectations after a blowout quarter.

And if happiness equals reality minus expectations, Jobs' reality distortion field helped

create some seriously happy investors each and every quarter.

I'm Mary Long and that's the Motley Fools on End Chocovalu.

Ricky Mulvey caught up with On End to uncover the techniques of hand-weavy finance.

They discuss how companies draw attention away from bad news.

The reasons why businesses like to adjust earnings and one investment,

that's the opposite of hand-weavy.

On and before we get into it, what is hand-weavy finance?

This is not an economic definition you can look up.

No, not at all. It's squishy as it should be. It's hand-weavy.

Yeah, it is squishy. There's something in between. It's not an outright fraud,

but it's also not just like buying an index fund. It's somewhere in that like in between land

where you start seeing the hand-weavy finance. This is, in my opinion, it's,

you see it a little bit in earnings calls. This is when a lot of it is when you're seeing investors

or CEOs trying to draw attention to a very specific thing in order for someone to not pay attention

to another thing. Yeah, it could be misleading, but it doesn't have to necessarily be.

It could be just focusing on the future, far out future, but just something that distorts

reality a bit, right? Yeah, so I think one example you brought up, it's when you see a little bit

of hand-weavy finance. That's when someone's talking about the shiny new thing.

...