Why doesn't Apple make gains where it actually helps shareholders?
Because stock prices are more psychological than anything else and even when they're based on real numbers, they're based on growth, not on sustained profits.
Apple's not making the extraordinary year-over-year unit gains that they once made and the expectations are so high that no company in the history of the planet could ever meet them. But the market has almost never treated Apple well except for a decent run around the time they split the stock. Every time Apple announced new record earnings, the market thought they wouldn't repeat it and punished the stock. Apple would announce something great and the stock would drop. One would think that the third highest-grossing (and probably the most profitable?) company's stock would be doing better than it is. But if you want total logic, you're not going to find it in the stock market where on any given day, nothing significant changes in the economy and companies don't announce anything, and yet their stocks increase or decrease substantially anyway without any rhyme or reason. How many times do you see the value of a company drop 5% over the course of a week for no perceptible reason or companies with absolutely no profits having high stock prices (for a time).
Amazon lost money cumulatively for something like the first 16 years of its existence and the core business actually makes very little -- it's the Cloud and distribution services that make money and yet Wall Street seems to love the stock.
And Steve Jobs always claimed he did not manage the company to increase the stock price and that's how it should be. Companies who manage for shareholder value usually wind up decreasing the quality of products over time as well as screwing their employees.
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Apple's not making the extraordinary year-over-year unit gains that they once made and the expectations are so high that no company in the history of the planet could ever meet them. But the market has almost never treated Apple well except for a decent run around the time they split the stock. Every time Apple announced new record earnings, the market thought they wouldn't repeat it and punished the stock. Apple would announce something great and the stock would drop. One would think that the third highest-grossing (and probably the most profitable?) company's stock would be doing better than it is. But if you want total logic, you're not going to find it in the stock market where on any given day, nothing significant changes in the economy and companies don't announce anything, and yet their stocks increase or decrease substantially anyway without any rhyme or reason. How many times do you see the value of a company drop 5% over the course of a week for no perceptible reason or companies with absolutely no profits having high stock prices (for a time).
Amazon lost money cumulatively for something like the first 16 years of its existence and the core business actually makes very little -- it's the Cloud and distribution services that make money and yet Wall Street seems to love the stock.
And Steve Jobs always claimed he did not manage the company to increase the stock price and that's how it should be. Companies who manage for shareholder value usually wind up decreasing the quality of products over time as well as screwing their employees.