Financials

Riding the AAPL Slingshot

Apple, as hedge fund managers are well aware, is one stock that always bounces back

Whenever I see a chart like the one at right, which traces the trajectory of Apple's (AAPL) share price over the past 36 days, I'm reminded of Jason Schwarz's "Apple: Seven Reasons Shorts Love It," a supremely cynical view of the stock market that may be the best thing The Street published in all of 2009. MORE

Bloggers vs. Pros on Apple's Q3: Yet another $2 billion gap

If you ask about sales in the quarter that just ended, you get three very different answers

Apple's (AAPL) third fiscal quarter of 2011 ended Saturday at midnight. How did it go? That depends whom you ask.

In April, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told analysts he expected Apple to earn $5.03 per share on sales of $23 billion. But given how Apple tends to low-ball its forward-looking guidance, nobody really believed him.

The MORE

Bullish Cross issued a rare 'buy' on Apple Friday

Not that it has done any good. Shares fell 1.5% that day and opened 0.9% lower on Monday

We've been following Andy Zaky's posts on Bullish Cross since 2007 and have found, as he likes to remind readers, that he's one of the best independent analysts following Apple (AAPL). His estimates of Apple's quarterly earnings are uncannily accurate. In the years we've been tracking them, they've never failed to beat those MORE

Apple's market cap is not gaining on Exxon Mobil's

But then, neither is Microsoft gaining on Apple

As measured by market capitalization (i.e., stock price times number of shares) Apple (AAPL) overtook Microsoft (MSFT) in May 2010 to become the world's most valuable tech company.

Apple still trails Exxon Mobil (XOM), the No. 1 publicly traded company, by more than $90 billion.

Apple as a coiled spring

What investors want to know is whether its stock will ever pop

The investors who follow the ups and downs of Apple's (AAPL) share price on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board often look with a mixture of envy and dismay at the price-to-earnings ratios of Amazon (81) and Netflix (76). Apple, by comparison, seems downright cheap with a trailing P/E of 15.57.

Yet Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX) are trading very MORE

Apple's 5.7% drop last week was par for the course

Average post WWDC loss: 5.4%. Average gain from the previous year: 56.8%

There was the usual gnashing of teeth on the Apple (AAPL) investor boards when the company's share price dropped $6.18 ($1.8%) Monday, the day of Steve Jobs' iCloud keynote.

Adding insult to injury, the stock continued to fall three out of the next four days. It closed Friday at $325.90, its lowest price since Dec. 2010, down 5.7% for the MORE

Gene Munster: Why Apple's share price has lagged

Piper Jaffray offers 3 reasons investors are nervous and 3 reasons they shouldn't be

In a note to clients issued Wednesday morning, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster takes a crack at the question Apple (AAPL) investors have been asking since January: Why, despite one record quarter after another, is the stock going nowhere?

The three reasons he offers will surprise no one who has been following this blog: (I quote)

The stock is already MORE

What Foxconn's blast did to Apple's Max Pain price

A case study in how the options market reacts to breaking news

We've written a lot lately about how traders buying and selling options seem to be driving Apple's (AAPL) share price (see here, here and here.) So we thought it might be instructive to look at what happened on a day when Apple's share price took over and drove the options market -- specifically, the so-called Max Pain price point MORE

Apple closes at or near 'Max Pain' 8 weeks out of 10

New evidence suggests that since last summer the tail has been wagging the dog

If you're any kind of Apple (AAPL) investor, you should be aware of the chart at right, even if you don't know a put from a call and don't really care to.

It shows the value in millions of dollars as of Wednesday morning of the outstanding Apple options that expire this Friday, with the magenta bars representing MORE

How can they call Apple the 'darling of Wall Street'?

The stock is up 330% since its 2008 low, but that's really nothing to write home about

In an article posted Friday on Seeking Alpha, Fortune.com contributor Andy Zaky takes aim at a phrase that has attached itself to Apple (AAPL) recently: "the darling of Wall Street." (Google it; you'll be surprised how often it pops up in the financial press.)

Apple is a darling, the thinking goes, because the stock has MORE