Posted on 01/10/2016 4:04:43 PM PST by Swordmaker
It’s painful to read much of what passes for business reporting about Apple these days. The combination of high page-click value and low barrier-to-entry has reduced online journalism to headlines like this:
That last piece, from Dow Jones’ MarketWatch, refers to Apple CEO Tim Cook as a “bozo” and advises readers, whatever they do, not to buy the company when its shares are near a 52-week low.
“Apple’s stock fell hard in the second half of 2015, and is now down about 25% from its July high,” wrote MarketWatch’s Jeff Reeves in a piece so wrong-headed Macworld’s press critic, the Macalope, felt obliged to offer a corrective:
“True! Hey, the overall market wouldn't also be down considerably since July, would it? Who knows? Apparently it's an unknowable item because it does not appear in this piece. When writing about Apple, it's important to remove any extraneous contextual information so as to pretend there are no outside factors. That's just how science works. Any astrologer will tell you that.”
Why, at the start of the earning season, does Apple click-bait fill the Web like so much chum? I blame it on the story arc that every editor understands instinctively and every cub reporter quickly learns: What’s up must come down. When the world’s most valuable company--and Wall Street’s most widely held stock--is at the top of its game, it must have nowhere to go but south.
Last summer, the meme that fueled negative Apple headlines was the so-called tough compare. The company was going to have a hard time beating its December 2014 quarter, the most profitable in the history of capitalism, because sales of the second wave of jumbo iPhone could never top the first.
Or so the narrative went until Cook told analysts in October that he expected Apple to sell even more iPhones this Christmas than it did the last.
That’s when the goal posts got moved.
Now the tough compare is the March quarter, and bearish reports from a half-dozen Apple suppliers (out of more than 200) are taken as proof that Apple over the next three months will miss its own sales and earning targets. How Apple can miss guidelines that won’t be announced for another two weeks--on Jan. 26, when the company reports its December earnings--is not explained.
These days, anybody can call himself an Apple analyst--including Global Equities Market’s Trip Chowdhry, the source of MarketWatch’s Tim-Cook-is-a-bozo line. Chowdhry also also called retail chief Angela Ahrendts “totally clueless.”
That makes him an expert source worthy of quotation on the Internet, where anybody can be a reporter and nobody knows you’re a dog.
Apple lost Steve Jobs. It’s going to become just another computer company in five years. Nobody can replace Jobs and his advice is already being ignored by the CEO.
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But the author doesn’t criticize those who keep pumping Apple while the stock drops. At the moment, those who warned the stock might drop were exactly correct.
Buy low, sell high.
Just wondering if a company is so great that it’s stock needs to rise, just how do meritless negative stories succeed in dropping that stock? I see lots of pro Apple articles as well - like this one.
Steve Jobs died four years ago and CEO Tim Cook was running Apple for two years before that. AAPL stock was selling at around a split adjust price of $60 before Steve Jobs' death, it has risen to over $130, and Apple became the largest company in the world by Market Cap under Tim Cook.
Apple turned in the most profitable quarter in the history of Capitalism during the last quarter of 2014, and Tim Cook expects to report that the last quarter of 2015 beats that. Every quarter of 2015 beat every record quarter of 2015 so far, so he has a pretty good chance of doing so. . . and you think the problem is with Tim Cook's management?
Exactly how is Tim Cook supposed to get advice from Steve Jobs? An OUIJA board?
Only the people who write negative things about Apple are wrong.
On the money.
Only the slowest observers haven’t figured this out yet.
Steve Jobs left behind plans for the company after his death — all spelled out.
Cook walked into it. But, as you pointed out, we are nearing the end of Job’s plan for Apple’s future.
The company is about to tank. Big time.
http://gizmodo.com/5848275/did-steve-jobs-leave-a-special-four-year-plan-for-apple
SELL SELL SELL.
The market is also 20% overvalued. So sell everything right now. It’s going to tank 1,000 points this week.
1. Chinese economy going into a recession that the government may not be able to spend it’s way out of.
2. Demand for commodities is in the tank.
3. US economy is on the knife edge of dropping into recession. Jobs always peak at the end of the cycle.
4. Apple will have to seriously innovate to grow product sales - especially iphones. 6s just wasn’t a step up that people wanted to pay for.
His point was they MADE it happen by being relentlessly negative against all indicators to the opposite. Apple has had the highest revenues and highest profits of any company in history. There should be NO legitimate reasons for the constant irrational drumbeat of negativity except to force the stock down. There was no reason to criticize the positive articles. They were making true comments.
The ones who publish positive data have every rational reason to point to Apple's successes and tons of legitimate evidence to back their articles up.
The negative FUD people have only unsubstantiated rumors with no basis in facts coming from their own echo chamber, quoting each other, with a single rumor as the basis for their repeated reports. It can be quite amazing. Anal-cyst 1 starts a rumor, anal-cyst 2, 3, and 4 quote anal-cysts 1's rumor and inflate his claims. The next day, anal-cysts 1,2,3, and 4 write new reports citing each other as proof of the dire "fact" that Apple is in trouble because other anal-cysts are seeing the same things happening. The drumbeat steps up because there are multiple headlines now from multiple anal-cysts, and others start quoting these anal-cysts, all citing the secondary sources without claiming its a rumor, linking the articles of anal-cysts 1,2,3, and 4. Then more pile on, linking other articles, and anal-cyst #1's original rumor article gets lost in the melee. Main stream news gets ahold of it. Apple refuses to make a comment. That spurs another round of commentary based on the idea that if Apple refuses to comment there HAS to be some truth to it, ignoring the fact that Apple NEVER comments on anything. . . and round and round we go. Add to all this that mentioning Apple in any headline generates clicks and ad revenue to the website.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2016/01/former-dallas-fed-governor-richard.html
The entire boom market was a fraud, pumped up by the fed since 2009. They are now ‘out of ammunition.’
The correction has started and it’s going to be brutal.
Fear and caution that it just might be true. "Better to be safe than sorry" attitudes. . . and a plethora of echo-chamber repetition based on the same false rumors. . . or sometimes there is a grain of mis-interpreted truth at the core of the story.
Oh and Apple stock blew though the $100 support point like it wasn’t even there. Closed below it. Charters say that is a very bad sign.
Of course it is all just a big mistake caused by FUD peddlers. /s
Yup.
SM: "Exactly how is Tim Cook supposed to get advice from Steve Jobs? An OUIJA board? "
~~~~~~~~
More to the point:
Does TigerClaws have a Ouija Board that enabled H/h/I to generate that FUD?
Or -- is TigerClaws just sourcing H/h/I FUD from H/h/I nether regions -- as do most FUD spewers?
Just another computer company? What does that mean? Apple dropped the "Computer" off their name years ago.
Ford lost Henry Ford (years ago in 1947), they're just another auto manufacturer company. Now that would be an appropriate statement. Ford (the company) is still around, although still concentrating on building cars.
Apple diversified. Outside of computers. Now pundits predict their downfall because of phone sales? It's not going to become just another phone maker, is that what you meant?
May be yes may be no. Jobs did some things very well. Others did some things even better.
The long term will decide. Right now I put my money on Apple to do quite well. Microsoft not so much
That article you posted was dated October 10, 2011, just three days after Steve Jobs died, and already the FUD posters were circling Apple, trying to drive the stock down. Yes, there were products in the pipeline. . . but Tim Cook had been running Apple for two years by then with Jobs in an advisory role.
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