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jer446

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 28, 2004
826
0
What the hell is going on?? Apple stock fell almost four dollars today? Why? It had such good reports yeesterday for its earnings, so shouldnt it go up, not down almost ten percent?!
 
o-v-e-r-v-a-l-u-e-d! or it was ... it was bound to be corrected and it might keep going down for a few more days sadly I don't think there was anything apple could have said to keep that stock up.
 
i noticed this too. Konfab's little stock widget shows a 9% decrease.

speaking of stocks.. what does everyone use to buy stocks? Any good online trading places for someone who just wants to buy a few stocks at a time? I don't particularly have the money to put $2000 into like etrade or ameritrade ... so probably $100 or so at a time every couple of months in various stocks (long term)
 
Logik said:
i noticed this too. Konfab's little stock widget shows a 9% decrease.

speaking of stocks.. what does everyone use to buy stocks? Any good online trading places for someone who just wants to buy a few stocks at a time? I don't particularly have the money to put $2000 into like etrade or ameritrade ... so probably $100 or so at a time every couple of months in various stocks (long term)
Logik,

If you have specific companies that you want to invest in, you can take advantage of a DRIP (direct re-investment plan) if that company has one. It allows you to buy stocks of an individual company without going through a broker. The advantage is that you don't pay any commission or have to keep a certain balance (you might want to check about the commission as DRIPs may vary). The downside is that to sell, you must send them your intent to sell in writing, so you won't be able to time your transactions.

But if you're in it for the long haul, DRIPs might be right for you. Do a google on DRIPs and check the "investor relations" tab on every companies website.

ft

EDIT - I went back to check if what I wrote was correct. Essentially it was. I found a good Motley Fool LINK that explains what I was talking about.

Here's another LINK .
 
jer446 said:
What the hell is going on?? Apple stock fell almost four dollars today? Why? It had such good reports yeesterday for its earnings, so shouldnt it go up, not down almost ten percent?!
This is very simple to explain. It doesn't matter that you had a great quarter... what matters is what's to come. Wall Street is all about "what have you done for me lately?" Microsoft, to tout one example, ALWAYS has great quarters, but they always use cautionary words to describe upcoming quarters. The result is almost always a substantial drop in the stock price once the record earnings and cautionary words are released.
 
Earnings weren't up as much as expected (the hype of the quarter already brought the stock much higher than it should actually have been trading at) and people are afraid that the next quarter won't hold up as well. All in all, it's just deflating a little from a position that was much higher than it realistically should be.

The drop has nothing to do with the stregnth of the company and personally I will probably pick up some of it myself if it drops into the low 30's.
 
Apple's guidance for Q3 was not bullish, simple as that. Investors have already set very high expectations for Apple. So, when they come out saying revenue will be flat quarter-to-quarter and earnings per share will *not* be as good as Q2, meaning they don't expect to maintain their margins, the share price has to fall. Personally, I think Apple intended to be very conservative about their guidance for Q3.
 
Found this on CNN/fn or CNN/Money (or whatever the heck they're calling it these days) today:

Apple Computer (down $3.78 to $37.26, Research) reported fiscal second-quarter earnings, revenue and iPod shipments late Wednesday that grew from a year earlier and beat estimates, thanks to strong sales.


But investors focused on its forecast, which was less rosy. Apple said third-quarter earnings would beat estimates, but revenue would just meet estimates, and this sparked a 9.2 percent drop in the stock Thursday. The fact that Apple stock has more than tripled over the last 12 months made it vulnerable, analysts said.
 
Haven't analyst been predicting the deimse of Apple for years? Havent they failed to predict how well Apple have performed financially for a year or so? (i.e. better than predicted)? My prediction: Analysts dont know what they're taking about most of the time.
 
MacSA said:
Haven't analyst been predicting the deimse of Apple for years? Havent they failed to predict how well Apple have performed financially for a year or so? (i.e. better than predicted)? My prediction: Analysts dont know what they're taking about most of the time.

It depends what type of analysts you're talking about, fundamental or quantitative.

I assume you're talking about fundamental and I agree with you. In my opinion, I don't care about the why I just want to know the what. So I favour quantitative (edit: a very basic quantitative, if they're qualified and giving me pages of statistics as a result of pretty equations I'm going to throw it back in their face).

AppleMatt
 
Logik said:
i noticed this too. Konfab's little stock widget shows a 9% decrease.

speaking of stocks.. what does everyone use to buy stocks? Any good online trading places for someone who just wants to buy a few stocks at a time? I don't particularly have the money to put $2000 into like etrade or ameritrade ... so probably $100 or so at a time every couple of months in various stocks (long term)
While you have to pay a fairly hefty commission ($7-$50+) for stock purchases, you can go with www.sharebuilder.com, where you can make non-realtime purchases for as little as $4/trade. An even better route (if you're not buying a lot of stock), is to call apple directly, ask for their investor relations department and find out if you can make direct share purchases. Lots of companies allow you to buy their stock directly from them and there would be no commission for the purchase, except for a small one time administration fee.

As for Apple's stock dropping, this isn't very surprising, considering apple's bullish run for the last couple of quarters. Expectations were WAY too high for the earnings so there had to eventually be a correction. I suspect that Apple's growth isn't going to stop anytime soon, so this should just be a small correction before apple resumes growing. It might be a good time to start watching for a buy signal.
 
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