President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, spoke with CNBC today and claimed Apple’s current earnings struggles have nothing to do with ongoing trade tensions in China.
Apple (AAPL) had its best single-day performance at the stock market today, seeing a 7.04% rise, the highest in one day since April 2014. The Dow Jones rose over 1,000 points, as the entire market — particularly FAANG stocks — rebounded after a tumultuous few bearish days.
Tesla (TSLA) also saw significant gains today, rising to over $300 a share after losing 21% of its value over the previous weeks.
$AAPL stock has opened below $100 in the first minutes of trading, erasing any gains since October 2014. Apple’s stock officially opened at $95.12 but has corrected slightly upwards since to circa $101. The fall in share price saw Apple’s market capitalization lose about $60 billion dollars in value today. Although any fall in price is bad news for the company, the 7% fall should not be taken at face value.
The whole market is down with losses across the board: the S&P saw a 5% overall fall — the largest one-day drop for four years. Technology stocks are being affected as much as any other sector. Twitter, Alibaba, Tesla and Netflix all saw falls in the double digits.
You might not think a stock outperforming the market and considered to have good future prospects would pose a problem for investors, but Reuters reports that it can prove challenging for fund managers.
The issue is that most diversified funds have rules or guidelines that state they shouldn’t hold more than 5-10% of their funds in any one stock. This, fund managers say, can pose three problems. First, there’s the obvious one: they may want to buy more of it than their own rules allow …
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AAPL stock has reached an all-time high three days straight in the week it launched Apple Pay, with the company touching $105.49 today …
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If there’s one thing as certain as the hype when Apple launches a new iPhone, it’s the “Apple is doomed” messages when the new model(s) fail to meet every single analyst prediction, no matter how crazy. Apple could add a matter transporter function to the iPhone 6 and some analyst would be complaining that it only operates on WiFi when they were expecting it to use LTE.
Business Insider pointed to a set of CNN charts which show that, typically, the AAPL stock price is down a month after a new iPhone launch. But any similar dip we might see after the launch of the iPhone 6 is no cause for concern: with the exception of 2013, Apple stock has been climbing since the first iPhone was launched in 2007.
As ever, make your own investment decisions with the aid of professional advice, but there certainly doesn’t appear to be any reason to be spooked if the launch of the new iPhone leads to some investors selling their shares. “Buy on the rumor, sell on the news” is a very common approach.
Apple’s first stock split since 2005 takes effect today, but the computers that track the stock price often forget to take that into consideration (above).
Why the 7-1 split? The lower buying price may open the door to more investments from smaller investors, and the ~$100 price would let it major indices list AAPL, opening the door to more investment.
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Investors seem to have taken heed of analyst ratings in response to the higher-than-predicted earnings Apple reported last week, the share price climbing from $524.75 before the company released its financials to approaching $600 at the time of writing.
Fortune suggests Apple’s results isn’t the only factor at play, with investors perhaps also following Greenlight Capital’s lead in moving out of other tech stock with particularly high price to earnings ratios – the measure of how a share price relates to its earnings. The higher the P/E ratio, the more over-valued it looks according to traditional measures …
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Apple just might find itself shopping around for a new finance partner for its retail stores after Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes likened the company’s future potential to that of Microsoft.
Downgrading AAPL from a buy to a hold, Reitzes said that while he was excited by the iWatch and Apple television ideas as a consumer, he didn’t see either driving double-digit growth. Quoted by Business Insider, he said:
We look at a valuation analogy vs. Microsoft from 2000 to about 2010 and see no precedent that large-size tech companies simply start to broadly outperform again after a tough year or two if the law of large numbers is catching up to them and margins have peaked.
Ouch! Still, it appears his pessimism is not universally shared.
Tables compiled by Whale Wisdom from SEC filings show which hedge funds bought AAPL shares last quarter and which ones sold (via Fortune).
The numbers show that 1,010 funds bought AAPL stock, while 847 sold. Morgan Stanley led the bulls – those buying – with purchases of 1.36M shares. As Fortune observes, this is no surprise given Katy Huberty’s target price of $630 (against a current price of $546 at the time of writing).
Despite Apple returning to growth for the first time in a year, AAPL stock opened almost 8 percent down, as iPhone sales fell below analyst predictions and Apple’s mid-point guidance on Q2 earnings forecast was for zero growth.
Analysts had predicted 55.3M iPhone sales, while Apple reported sales of 51M. Analysts were also disappointed in Apple’s guidance for Q2 of $42-44B, as the mid-point of $43B would not show any growth over the same quarter last year …
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After the fall in Apple’s stock value when the China Mobile failed to materialise as expected on 18th December, yesterday’s news that the deal had finally been concluded sent the stock shooting back up again, having climbed more than 3 percent at the time of writing (it was up 4% in pre-market trading but has settled).
With the WSJ having reported that 18th December was the day, the market was clearly jittery when nothing materialized. Everything had appeared to be in place: regulatory approval, Apple putting the handsets on sale in China on the opening weekend, China Mobile posters, a pre-order website, in-store displays – and 4G service up-and-running on schedule …
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Fortune ran a couple of pieces showing what happened to Apple’s stock price after investor Carl Icahn’s tweets, with his initial announcement that he had taken a “large position” in AAPL, followed by news that he’d had a “nice conversation” with Apple CEO Tim Cook – and a subsequent tweet yesterday that he’d “pushed hard for a 150 billion buyback” over a “cordial dinner.”
The total effect? A jump in Apple’s valuation totalling around $23B – or approaching a cool $8B per tweet.
Would be nice to know when he’s about to tweet, eh?
For the second time this year, Apple’s stock has dipped below $400 per share. The share price touched below $400 in April, after dropping hundreds of dollars per share from its all-time-high of over $700 in fall of 2012. This new drop follows Apple CEO Tim Cook adjusting his bonus compensation to better reflect Apple’s stock performance and several Apple executives cashing in on tens of thousands of shares. The NASDAQ, itself, is down nearly 2%, which likely plays into Apple’s drop today.
