Replies

This was my reply to a fellow posting on Time Magazine:

Commenter: "Stocks price on FUTURE earnings. Not past results which are already priced in. Their forward guidance is what's hitting the stock.
iPhones are their entire company now. Seeing slower sales going forward. Not good. Watch is a disaster. So bad they wouldn't even comment on number of units sold (and try to put a shine on it by saying it's sold more than ipod and ipad in the same sales window). Doesn't mean much since those products are now very low sellers. Peak Apple has happened. Get used to it."

My (slightly edited) reply to the Commenter: You mistake what they are saying with the Apple Watch sales. They are NOT saying that the Apple Watch is outselling what the iPod (which is a mis-characterization of what was said; they said the first iPhone) and the iPad are selling NOW, what they said, Commenter, is that the Apple Watch out sold the numbers of those iconic products sold on their first release in equivalent periods.
The iPad, in particular, was the fastest and largest selling product of all time at its release in 2010, and has remained the record holder since. The Apple Watch has, in its release, eclipsed the iPad's initial sales numbers and done so in a shorter time. In other words, Commenter, the record has been broken.
Tim Cook and Apple's CFO did indeed comment on the Apple Watch in the Financial Conference Call. They just did not attach any specific unit sales numbers or dollar figures to those sales. The Apple Watch sales are not a disaster. Get used to it.
As for future sales, Apple gave exceptional guidance going forward, predicting a fourth fiscal 2015 quarter with a range of $49-$51 Billion in revenue. . . especially when 2014's fourth fiscal quarter was only $42 Billion.
That's a 16.7% to 21.4% growth rate over last year's 3rd quarter, year over year, far exceeding the growth of the industry, which is receding. That quarter will be followed by Apple's historically best first quarter of the following fiscal year, the December holiday quarter.
Basically, you, Commenter, like the after hours traders fell for the hype of the idiots who wrote the panic laden headlines pushed by some know-nothings who actually LIED about what happened when they published headlines claiming that Apple had falsely "missed revenue and EPS expectations" when all they had missed was a small minority of very bullish analysts who pulled some numbers out of their nether regions with very little evidence to back up their over inflated expectations!
Even their claim that Apple's guidance is missing the Street is absurd, since Apple says they expect revenue to be between $49 and $51 billion and the "whisper" number for the expected guidance was $51.13 Billion. . . WOW!
Apple missed predicting the future Revenue guidance by a mere $130 million —and the bottom drops out of their stock valuation based on that???? REALLY? Apple missed hitting their wild bass (read "dead-fish") guesstimate by a quarter percent????
And for that error, over $50 billion in investor's value was destroyed in almost the blink of an idiotic journalist's myopic eye. Oh, the humanity of it all! What sheer stupidity.
What makes it even more idiotically stupid is that not eight hours before, multiple pundits were claiming the Street was expecting revenues from Apple of only $46.2 Billion— which Apple handily beat—and no one was really looking for such a huge guidance for next quarter until some journalist told them they were looking for it.
But they told these nervous nellies just at the stroke of five PM after the market had closed, when a flurry of what I think were deliberately falsely negatively headlined articles hit the Internet—just as Apple's CEO and CFO were starting their Financial Conference Call to announce Apple's 3rd Quarter 2015 results.
Who orchestrated this flurry of negativity is an interesting question.