thompr

anantksundaram said:

thompr said:

If you can't take a long term view with Apple and can't stand a wild ride in the meantime, it's best you look to another stock.

That's just a silly comment. (1) You have no idea of whether he owns AAPL, and if so, how long he's owned his stock; (2) Your advice seems tantamount to telling him to buy high and sell low. 

(1) That was meant as the general "you".  Just advising that AAPL is not for the impatient and/or weak-hearted.

(2) I am trying to say don't bother buying AAPL to begin with unless you have patience and a bit of fortitude.

Does that make a little more sense now?

fallenjt said:

rotateleftbyte said:

Search + Ads? WTF are you smoking. Apple has just about shutdown iAds. Ads are for Google and they rightly get blocked at my router (as does 100+ MS domains). IMHO, Ads are a plague and one way Apple can differentiate itself is NOT to offer Ads.
Offering Streaming services is nothing more than a MeToo. It will probably make money but it won't make Apple stand out from the crowd.
As for Banking etc, that would need a totally separate company in many parts of the world.
The US Banking industry is really backward. Unless Apple can come in and really shake it up (and let a lot of small regional banks go to the wall) it should be a non-starter. State laws make a truly Nationwide bank a real hard thing to setup. The simple act of moving some money from one state to another can end you up in Jail if you don't do it right. That is plain crazy and until the Banking system in the US is totally refomed APPLE should stay well out of it.

You have to have take a world view with Apple not a US centric one.

What about Apple starting investing in BioMedical/Life Science? I know Google did with their Verily. It's very promising field for developing Life Science processes to support the Apple Watch for such things: Glucose, Cholesterol monitoring sensors, Pace Maker, Defibrillator integrations and such...

Apple has already been investing heavily in this area.  It's going to take time for whatever they are working on to manifest in a product... probably in Apple Watch 3 or so, I'm just guessing.

Look... we all know that Apple needs a new "hit" product, but everyone needs to understand that if & when they deliver one it won't be a "needle mover" immediately.  Even the glorious iPhone took years to become the *iPhone*.

If you can't take a long term view with Apple and can't stand a wild ride in the meantime, it's best you look to another stock.

atlapple said:

nolamacguy said:

let me guess -- you're a "long-time" fan. love their products. but now you're...concerned. jobs is dead. innovation gone. did i miss anything, or is that about where you stand?

Innovation isn't gone and no one at this point really cares if Jobs is dead. However Tim Cook isn't a very good messenger and I can't think of many companies were at least one high level member of the leadership wouldn't have taken a pounding by now after shedding over 200 billion in market cap, without any real message change. 

The reality is Mac sales were down slightly, iPad sales continue to drop even with the introduction of the iPad Pro and Wall Street sees Apple as a one product company. Not only did Apple not meet expectations this time around I don't think they even met their own guidance.

Loving Apple products and smart investing are in two very different categories. It's perfectly reasonable to look at Apple differently from a product and investing standpoint. 

Apple met their guidance this time around, narrowly meeting expectations as well.  The problem was that the guidance they gave for "next time around" was significantly below expectations.

apple iigs said:

sog35 said:

I disagree. 

Steve Jobs did not have prolonged periods of Apple having a 10-12 PE.
Apple was never this ridiculously under valued like how it was from 2013-2014 and now.

Steve Jobs did a lot better with wall street then Tim Cook because Steve Jobs didn't care about wall street like Tim Cook portrays. He just didn't give them any impact. His way was as Apple does so does the stock and you saw that in his focus and his incredible products and low and be hold Apple stock was just fine. 

Wall street will always be wall street. They pick on Apple because they are greedy and they know when Apple is in the news ratings and clicks go up so they love the attention. Here is looking at you CNBC get your camera time and head shots and makes waves as long as you can while that camera is pointed at you.

Tim Cook's focus seems to be to reliant on appeasing wall street. This is not what Apple is about. Apple is about being focused and making great products. What happened to that.

When Steve Jobs was around, there was reasonable hope that Apple could grow in size by a factor of 2-3x (or more) and, in fact, that has since occurred under Tim Cook's leadership.  Try to convince a majority of Wall Streeters that Apple could grow another 2-3x from this point forward and you'll probably fail.  (Even I doubt that!)  It's that simple.  Don't blame Cook for this.  Blame Wall Street for their insatiable appetite.  Jobs could do no better, nor could anybody else.

Many on Wall Street see diminished capacity for growth (probably true) and increasing probability of iPhone collapse (probably false).  Put those two together and that means there is an unfavorable risk/reward formula in the minds of many people.  They may be wrong.  But that doesn't matter.  As Crowley said above, the stock price is nothing more than a barometer of average expectations.  The stock market is like an auction, in which the "value" of an item is defined by whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay.  There is no "objective value" other than that.  PE ratios and PEG ratios are useful tools, but at the end of the day, the market is an auction based on expectations.  And once your company is doing so well that a lot of people disbelieve in your growth story, then those ratios become completely useless.

foggyhill said:

jdnc123 said:

Honest question.  How do you think Steve Jobs would feel about the market saying Google is a better and thus more valuable company as it is today.  Google has an enterprise value of $420 billion versus Apple at $372 billion.  Google is about to pass Apple in market cap also.  The stock is lower than it was in 2012 due to massive multiple compression, which has happened because the Street saw the growth slowing, apparently even before the CEO did.  Google has increased by $200 billion or so in value since 2012, MIcrosoft by $150 billion, Netflix by $40 billion, Amazon by $175 billion, all while Apple lost $130 billion of total enterprise value.  The idea that this is just 'the market' is complete and utter garbage.  Its an Apple problem, not a market problem.  I'm a lover of Apple products and owner of the stock, but I can't convince myself that the other companies I mentioned havent been making bolder moves than Apple under Tim Cook.

I personally think Jobs is rolling in his grave because Cook has allowed Google to surpass Apple in value.  Given how much he hated them, he has to be.

So, did those gurus on wall street "know" about that future slowdown (sic) in 2012....when Apple was valued as low as now despite the fact that there was 200B in profits coming up within 4 years. Why didn't these doufus idiots reflect that in the god damn price like they's supposed to.

By your measure, a company that makes:
40B 50B 100B 101B 99B 103B 106B  in profits
 should have a lower stock price than a company making
30B 35B   40B   45B 50B   55B 60B 65B profits over the same period....
Hey, the second company is growing!!

That's how Wall Street works.
Even worse, if the same company had a growth profile like the second one, instead of the first, its stock price would be higher!

IF I present things like that, people would say, well that's ridiculous... The first company would had 10+15+60+56B+44B+43B+41B=269B more money in the bank that the successful second company! than the second one and would still likely make money than the second for another 5-6 years... so, another 100B more at least even it didn't grow.

Well, that's how it is in gambling land that is the stock market; were shuffling paper barely has to make sense as long as someone is ready to buy them.

Price of stock is supposed to reflect present value of future profit, are you telling me that's what Wall street did 3 years ago; are you for god damn real?
Please start making sense in your argument.

Wall street shits out a number based who the knows what. Google would need to quadruple its profit within 3-4 years for its valuation to make sense; well, good luck on that with Facebook breathing down their necks and their moonshots all using up money instead of generating it.

People keep wanting to compare Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Amazon to Apple and make sense out of the discrepancies in P/E ratios, etc.  That is an exercise in futility, and it is not even an appropriate comparison anyway.

Apple makes the majority of its earnings from hit hardware products.  Traditionally such things can collapse very very quickly (just ask RIM, Palm, Nokia, etc).  It takes a lot longer to turn the tide if you are a leader in office software (Microsoft), search (Google), social (Facebook) or retail (Amazon).  These guys are going to stay on top of their respective mountains for a long long time.  Wall Street is afraid that Apple could get RIMed in the next few years, and there is a long, long, way to fall.

Now I believe that Apple's situation is very different and far more stable than those other vanquished companies that I mentioned (Palm, Nokia, etc).  And likely most of the people here do too.  But what matters the most is whether a significant number of investors on Wall Street think otherwise.  Apparently they do.  Enough people are expecting Goliath to fall that a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy has occurred.

Aside to Sog:  This has nothing to do with Cook, and we can't cry about the unfairness relative to Google, etc.  It is what it is, and it was inevitable once Apple shattered the record for company performance with a hit hardware product that (unlike search or MS Office) becomes yesterday's news every year.  There are a lot of good arguments for why Apple should be able to sustain their current awesome performance, if not grow it slowly and steadily.  But these arguments are falling on deaf ears.  They won't believe Cook just because he says so.