http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=
I remember just a month ago when they were trading at $700. Interesting thing I looked up today… Every quarter from 2003 to mid 2011, Apple has beat earnings estimates. Every single quarter. Wtf? However, they have now trailed estimates 2 quarters in a row. Are people getting too optimistic about the stock?
I was just figuring out my target price to enter a position. I’m a buyer at $525-535. I’d like to see it break below the 200 DMA. If the hedge funds start selling we could see a pretty sharp decline. I’ll buy when people get pissed.
You can’t growth at 30%+ forever and not expect investors to start asking for 40%
Its amazing how the stock trades at a PE of under 10. But to value a company that makes 3 products at $1T+ (PE 20) is ridiculous as well no matter what value/growth/graham/buffet/magic number investing say.
Funny thing is, everytime I ask myself: which modern big tech company will mostly likely not exist in 25 years (GOOG/MSFT/AAPL/AMZN/IBM/ORCL), my first reaction is always Apple.
I just can’t convince myself that iphones and ipads are enough to keep growing at anything near their current clip. I hav a buddy who has been pitching AAPL to me for a year or so, and I just haven’t heard a good enough argument to buy other than momentum. I’m not a fan of momentum trading, since I’m pretty confident that I would suck at it.
However, if they revolutionize the TV market like they did the music world, that’s a different story.
iPhones and iPads are not enough. Apple cannot maintain 40% margins if the competition creeps up from behind… which they are already doing. So yeah, agree that the stock will go down without the next big thing. I don’t think it’s Apple TV though. The whole point of Apple’s success is that people are moving away from fixed point devices.
AAPL was trading what, around $150 back in say late 2007? Regardless of crazy margins, and continual innovation, anyone who bought back then or even in the $200-300 range are getting out now. The bagholders who bought at 600 -700+ are just giving these guys a good buffer to exit on. I’ll buy on pullbacks only on AAPL and only on major long term technicial levels, like 200ema…
^The 200ema was crossed today.
^Well, I would like to see it either bounce a couple times, or close ‘Above’ the 200ema before thinking about going long.
If it closes today, and stays below 200ema next week on good volume, then fck it, won’t touch it.
It will have to be a revolution to mobile TV.
I’m a big fan of Apple and bought a bucketload of stock at $85 the day they announced iPhone. Thank you stock market!
I bought it because they understood what other people didn’t. They had stuff that worked when other people’s stuff was broken and figured they would bring that to mobile phones.
But honestly they are starting to suck. Mountain Goat is a bug ridden mess, packed with “features” nobody asked for while breaking things that previously worked (like audio without pops). Starting to feel like windows in 2002 (yuk). Jobs would have never released that crap. Maps was a failure of course, and Tim had to apologize to the world. Jobs would have *never* apologized because he would have never shipped that crap. I noticed 10 seconds after opening it last weekend it was a fail. Spent an hour walking around the subway exits trying to find the freakin’ restaurant because iMaps got hosed. How did they not see the obvious? iCloud is beta. Ditching iDisk (which as an artist favorite for many years) was a weird move, iCloud provides no solutions. If I were going to short something it would be these guys.
I don’t think they will be able to hold together what Jobs built. Too many idiots in the corporate world, you need a strong leader to keep them in line. About this Tim Cook guy, who is he? I bet he’s going to keep making short sighted decisions, it will take a while for it to lose momentum, but gradually their stuff will become disfunctional and all the core fans depart. Maybe takes 5yrs.
Anyhow I say mid/long term it goes to hell. Which sucks cause I’ve been a mac guy for a decade but I say short it and build a custom PC with the proceeds.
They ought to just try to maintain their core fan base. Their *reputation* and making stuff that worked is what got them there. I think desperate thinking about “how do we maintain insane growth and profitability” is what is triggering them to ship crap. So Tim Cook can point to some numbers on a spreadsheet and say “see I did something”. Short-sighted in my opinion.
Heard this the other day about the guy who got canned:
“Mr. Forstall recently told people that there is no “decider” now that Mr. Jobs is gone.”
If that’s true, they are in for trouble. There can only be one vision, a messy mix of visions, that’s PCs!
Err…you really need to get up to speed on who is running apple. This smacks of pure ignorance. The people who are in charge of Apple aren’t “idiots” that need to be kept in line, many of them are the core reason that Apple is successful.
That iPanel tv thing is still quite a ways off. We’ve heard nothing about it. I expected that we’d get to flirt with it in time for Christmas but there is no way in Hell now.
There are lots of directions Apple could take themselves right now, but the only thiing they seem to be concerned with is selling a lot of phones and ipads.
They’ve just about abandoned every other part of their business which is somewhat unfortunate although understandable. If I were running apple I’d have Apple TV’s, Air Conditioners, Refrigerators. Apple would have a system in charge of all household energy. This would all be controlled centrally by one Apple TV / Computer. Hell maybe even a car. Who wouldn’t want to see what Jonny Ive and a team of german engineers could come up with? I’d push education a ton as well. Get every decent classroom fully applefied.
Sure you could argue that this would ruin the brand, but I think if things are well executed, people will demand it for their homes the same way they wanted it for their music collection and then their smart phones. People never thought it would work with phones and it didn’t at first. But Jobs didn’t give up. Apple could be a major force for good in the US economy instead of running the worlds biggest hedgefund.
apple fan boys…
I don’t know if we should discount Apple’s management just yet. However, management gridlock and lack of an “ultimate decider” are legitimate concerns. Apple has had outsized success on products that were controversial at first (iPhone, iPad). Without some kind of evangelist/messiah/super executive like Steve Jobs, will they be able to agree on new unconventional visions for the future? Or will they fall into the same pattern as Dell, HP, or IBM, where they just rely on incremental improvements to existing products? This would be a less risky but less profitable path.
Clearly, Tim Cook, unlike Jobs, does not envision himself as the master of all user experience. That’s why he promoted Jony Ive and some other guys to share this responsibility. I’m sure they will run the company well and efficiently. However, can they maintain this weird religious experience? I’m a bit concerned about that one.
Didn’t Apple do this back in the day? All the computers in my grade school were Macs. Word mumchers and Oregon Trail ran like a charm on those bad boys, but that was the last time I used a Mac.
As I say here: http://www.analystforum.com/forums/investments/91310551?page=2
Now that there are competing technologies, the iPhone’s dominance relies on stickiness of existing consumers more than growth in new customers. Changing the connection is a big F-U to them and at the same time frees them to buy non-iPhone since their existing attachments are now a sunk cost with no use. I like AAPL stuff and think the stock is relativley cheap…but, I also think that the pace/dominance will slow at some point in the next few years. It may follow the same trend as the PC, where AAPL dominated the market and then lost out to cheaper, more flexible competitors. And, Jobs isn’t around to save the company this time.
Additionally the earnings miss was a big event in my mind. With managements increasingly using the sell side as a mouthpiece, earnings meets and beats provide limited information but earnings misses are very statistically significant because they signal that despite management’s best efforts to manage expectations to earnings they either:
Didn’t communicate well with the sell side.
Don’t have an understanding of where their earnings are headed, either beause they didn’t properly assess the revenue pipeline or had poor cost estimates.
Anyway, I’m avoiding it.
You have died of dysentery.
It reminds me of a dictator. When a country has a powerful dictator, respected and charismatic, everyone is loyal and stay on the same page. Once that dictator is no longer there, that’s when things go in different directions and it could take a long time to get back on course.