Neil HughesIn his latest note to investors issued Tuesday afternoon, analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said Apple typically outperforms in the last four months of the year, up 43 percent, and underperforms in the first four months of the year, up 2 percent. This year, he said, investors are just taking their typical sell-off a little early, to capitalize on the strong gains of late '09.
In addition, he said shares may have, in years past, been driven up in December in anticipation of Apple's participation in the Macworld conference. The company's 2009 appearance was its last.
Munster said he remains confident that the December quarter will provide upside, driven by Mac, to reassure investors.
"There has been disagreement on the Street as to what has caused the recent slide in AAPL shares," he said. "We believe it is the cumulative effect of several seasonal and industry wide market forces at work."
Another factor in Apple's recent stock struggles: The ongoing ad war between Verizon and AT&T, and the recent launch of the Motorola Droid, also accompanied by an advertising blitz.
"Collectively, these competitive forces may have had a slight negative impact on consumer sentiment towards the iPhone," Munster said. "Also, large cap stocks GOOG, AMZN, QCOM and AAPL have each underperformed the market in the past 5 trading days."
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We believe it is the cumulative effect of several seasonal and industry wide market forces at work.
Where can I apply?
Anyway, no one knows, and it'll all get corrected come the next quarterly report, which should be very, very nice.
It's mainly technical trading driven by the institutions. It can be very annoying on the downside of course, but if you're a small investor you have to accept that this the way it works unfortunately.
It looks like a lot of people/institutions had an automatic 'sell' at or around $200. Take your profit and wait for the bottom of the W.
You'll see significant downward pressure when AAPL gets back up to the $200-210 range... just before it bumps up again around May-June to $275ish after record growth/profits/sales.
Unless something happens to Jobs along the way...
With the next gen iPhone not due out until around April 2010, and some fairly innovative GPS based apps now appearing for Android, the improved spec of phones like the Droid (and forthcoming big screen HTC Android models), and of course, the fact Android is being scaled up to appear on larger devices, Apple will face a threat in the mobile cloud computing space by mid 2010 - unless they can answer back.
Not to mention Windows 7, that offers multitouch on the desktop and laptop today. Not, it's not as polished, but it's available and application developers can exploit it.
Yes, Apple will do touch right on their next generation non iPhone hardware, but then, by then, their stock will rise again!
That's the way the cookie crumbles.
It looks like a lot of people/institutions had an automatic 'sell' at or around $200. Take your profit and wait for the bottom of the W.
You'll see significant downward pressure when AAPL gets back up to the $200-210 range... just before it bumps up again around May-June to $275ish after record growth/profits/sales.
Unless something happens to Jobs along the way...
Do you mean Jobs or jobs? It would certainly help to have something happen to jobs!
Institutions buy and sell on technical indicators. Once a stock breaks through a mathematically determined level of support, the sell button is pushed automatically. The market has run up a lot over the last six months -- so all the big traders are really itching to push that button.