“What’s the goal here? Drive Apple out of business our get it taken over by the government?”
Neither. The situation with Apple here is twofold. First, they are missing the mark on sales projections for a number of obvious and a few not-so obvious reasons.
Second, the QE garbage by the feds is encouraging people into higher risk stocks. And since Apple is the “Wall Street Darling”, everyone and their uncle is trading it.
Okay, they are missing the mark. That happens in business. It doesn’t mean they are some sort of pariah organization.
Read some of these threads.
As for selling stock, what business doesn’t want their stock to sell?
That’s no indicator of foul play.
As for QE garbage from the Fed, how is Apple responsible for that?
+1.
Apple missed no marks on sales projections. The had a RECORD QUARTER. The only mark they missed was wild assed guesses by the most extreme of the anal-cysts which drove the STREET average up. Apple hit its guidance for the quarter which is traditionally and historically the slowest of the year. . . and exceeded most analysts expectations. For the first time in history, AFTER THE MARKET CLOSED, they claimed that Apple's guidance for next quarter missed their expectations by 0.25% when Apple's upper tick on their guidance of $49-$51 BILLION didn't make the suddenly never-berore-not-rounded-off STREET Whisper number of $51.16 BILLION. REALLY??? They missed by $0.16 billion, $160 million? That's a mere blip when these numbers are being tossed around in estimates!
That Whisper number is way too precise to mean a DAMN THING!
What was amazing to me was that Yahoo! Finance had completely different Street numbers at 8:30 AM the morning of Apple's Financial Call than the ones they reported at the EXACT TICK of the close of market, exactly when Apple sent out the press release with their actual figures. . . and the ones at close of market were approximately $2 BiLLION higher then the Street expectations that morning! They were bald faced lies in an article whose headline SCREAMED that Apple had "missed Earnings" expectations when it DID NOT, even in the very article itself! It was obvious to me that the article was written even before the actual figures were released. . . and it was just waiting for those to be plugged in. . . and they forgot to adjust their phone STREET expectations high enough. THIS WAS PLANNED . . . and so is this drop in AAPL!