How is that possible? Ten years ago, AAPL was $12 (split-adjusted). That's a factor of twelve.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Stock Reached New All-Time Highs This Week
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Characterizing him as just a "supply chain guy" doesn't do him justice. He's so much more than that and gets a big chunk of credit for Apple's overall success.
Last edited:
Reverse War Games: the only way to lose the game is not to play.
Not the right forum for this, but honestly this is crazy. If you were rich enough to have had money in the market over the last 10 years and you kept it there, you are doing fantastic. If you didn't have those investments, you were behind back then and are now much further behind.
Even further than that, longs that tried to do the wait-buy-sell-wait-buy timing of their entries showed less profit then buy and hold.
That doesn't mean it will always be that way but that was on a 5 year chart study
Oops you're right, that's what I get for not remembering my number of initial shares correctly.
Side note, but I don't believe this is true:Related-
Warren Buffett's AAPL mistake cost Berkshire Hathaway $18B - 9to5Mac
Warren Buffett's AAPL mistake cost Berkshire Hathaway up to $18B, after the billionaire investor earlier admitted that selling some ...9to5mac.com
Buffett started as an AAPL skeptic, stating that technology was a risky field, and he didn’t understand the business well enough to predict its future potential. He later changed his mind, explaining that he now views the company more like a consumer or fashion brand with a huge amount of brand loyalty.
Not that I don't believe Buffett didn't say this, but that this is not actually the investment thesis. Basically Buffett's investment thesis is to invest in monopolies or as close to a monopoly as is available. He was a skeptic of Apple because he thought Apple faced too much competition. Buffett prefers companies what own their space and can use their economic power and lack of meaningful competition to dictate prices to their customers. He didn't see that at Apple. I suspect he now sees the OS, the App Store, and the technological advances as sufficiently similar to a monopoly economic power to be a compelling investment for Berkshire. The thing is Buffett can't just say "The US government basically allows monopolies and near monopolies and those companies can charge their customers lots of money (or pay their employees very little) and make big profits. I like to invest in those companies and get some of those profits." He can't say that because the politicians might pass laws or enforce existing laws and hurt the monopolies Berkshire invests in. So he says something about "brand loyalty" being Apple's edge. But it is bull and I suspect Buffett knows that.
True but a bad way to look at it. FOMO (fear of missing/missed out) never helps. Most everyone missed Tesla from just a few years ago. There will always be big money opporunties missed.
Today is the rest of your money management life. In the last 14 years there have been two big bears but they were followed followed by two giant bulls. Bet on it, there will be more big bear crashes followed by even bigger bulls.
To everyone, money cannot just sit. It loses value. If not sure of anything market/individual stock wise, buy the ETF named SPY(and start reading on industries, sub industries and the Funds that invest in them). SPY will go significantly down at times(bear markets) but over the long haul your money is extremely likely to beat inflation by up to 4 points. With a little luck of hitting a bull at the right time, you could see returns double or triple of inflation.
In 2001 I won $3000 in a music composition competition and bought myself a G4 with an Apple display to go for my university studies. If I could go back and give myself any advice I'd say buy their stocks instead and use the computers that the university offers for free. I own stocks today but at a much higher price than 2001...still it is sour to think how much money it would be today.
Last edited:
Related-
Warren Buffett's AAPL mistake cost Berkshire Hathaway $18B - 9to5Mac
Warren Buffett's AAPL mistake cost Berkshire Hathaway up to $18B, after the billionaire investor earlier admitted that selling some ...
Important lesson takeaway: even the very best can't necessarily know the best entry and exit points. Buffett's own saying is one of the best pieces advice I think any investor will evert hear, The stock market is a transfer of wealth from the impatient to the patient
(and you can see even Warren Buffett can be guilty of it).
Apple's PE is riding a bit high (near 33). That can make investors nervous for Apple's supposed industry (Apple is peerless but Wall Street doesn't see it that way). So while Apple hit a new all time high we saw resistance today in the 145 to 145.50 zone. But the good news is volume has been rising (not to January levels but beating May-June levels). A lot of shares are changing hands at the 145 level. Hopefully it's building support that will make that the new floor.
Ultimately, if Apple can make a sharp breakout above 146, it could run 10 points up before earnings release on July 28.
IF Apple has completed its share buyback (up to 4% shares taken off the financials), crush earnings again like they did last quarter, that will equal a significant Earnings per share spike and drop PE notably. That will lend for a better comfort level of buying for institutions. And at earnings time IF Apple starts offering guidance again that reaffirms these last 3 quarters aren't a one time thing, forgetaboutit! Only an overall economic downturn will keep you/me/Apple from hseeing a sharp spike upward in the next couple of months (but anything can happen of course).
I have enough shares to get myself a new iMac soon on this weeks performance. Going to wait to see it holds or the profit takers knock it down again.
Please cite that monopoly thesis by Buffett. The pricing power and leverage of being large is not a monopoly.
Top 5 Berkshire holdings: Apple, Bank of America, Coca Cola, American Express, Kraft Heinz Foods.
Several of the other top holdings: Well Fargo, Moodys, Charter Communications, Amazon, Visa.
The closest to monopoly I know of is Google's web search business (90+% of the market). I didn't see Google on his list. (Side note, I think Google is a great buy and I do own it).
Buffett has often said he invests in companies that, he believes, offers a product that people need and/or sticks with them. He keeps them in the long haul IF there isn't a disruption product on the horizon (because a company's cash flow remains strong when no new disruptive products come along). But also if he believes the management team is a top team. That is why he loves Apple. He said he would own Apple if he could. He doesn't see Apple as a monopoly, he has stated he sees them as a extremely well run company that offers a sticky product (mentioning both the iPhone and the eco). he sees Apple as top management, top namebrand, top product, no foreseeable disruption of that.
A few people have written about this. It isn't entirely hidden. Buffett explains it often in that he likes businesses that are situated in ways that they are very unlikely to face competition. You could say "not face disruption", but that is another way of saying "won't face competition forcing the company to either lower prices or improve product". He won't ever say, "I like to own monopolies" because he knows that a monopoly is technically illegal even if enforcement is weak these days. Matt Stoller has an email you can subscribe to. Had an email focused on Warren Buffet. Here is a quote:
For today’s post, I’m going to do an interview with Dayen on his new book, Monopolized. Monopolized is a mix between a business book and a travelogue, a set of stories about people living under the control of various powerful corporate entities, from Wall Street to Amazon to prison and the military. There’s also a roadmap for how to fight back, and Dayen profiles Israeli anti-monopolists who successfully did just that. One interesting aspect of Monopolized is that Warren Buffettis a silent presence throughout, profiting quietly in the background from virtually every monopoly Dayen describes. We don’t often hear of Buffett as a great monopolist, but that’s what he actually is. So in this interview, that’s who we focused on.
Your book is about monopolies. One character who keeps popping up in the book, surprisingly, is Warren Buffett. He’s a genial kindly old man in the media. But who is Warren Buffett in this book?
Buffett is the avatar of monopoly. This is a guy whose investments philosophy is literally that of a monopolist. I mean, he invented this sort of term, the economic “moat,” that if you build a moat around your business, then it's going to be successful. I mean, this is the language of building monopoly power. He not only looks for monopolies in the businesses he invests in, but he takes it to heart in the business that he's created, Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway owns something like 70 or 80 or 90 companies and they have large market shares in all sorts of areas of the economy.
It's kind of like an old school conglomerate from the sixties and seventies, but there are certain facets of it, where he's clearly trying to corner a market. Buffett's initial businesses that he actually outright purchased were newspapers. It started with the Buffalo News in Buffalo, New York. And he used anti-competitive practices to put the competition, his rival newspaper, out of business. That was literally his MO there.
If the only monopoly you can think of is Google's search, then you don't realize the world that you are living in. Or maybe you have a very technical belief about what a monopoly is and you think two companies in a market can't functionally create a monopoly-like situation by having an "understanding" not to undercut each other's prices. This happens all the time. The "understanding" doesn't have to written down or even verbalized. But there are many many industries where functionally there are only two or three suppliers. They reach an understanding and profit by that understanding. The buyer may even think they have a choice (or maybe they even have a choice: Coke or Pepsi), but the price the buyer pays is basically set outside of just market and competitive forces.
Large companies use their economic power to first put competitors out of business (or maybe just buy them) and second raise prices on their customers or cut the cost and quality of their product now that there is less competition. That is something that is happening in this world on a very regular basis and dramatically effects your life. As a society we've basically gotten comfortable with this situation and even think it is normal or inevitable. Then we wonder why inequality is dramatically increasing or why it is so expensive to get something large and of significance done.
Yes Warren Buffett believes in the revenue-profit moat.
But the monopoly comment is another's interpretation. it is not Buffett's words and as you can see from his holdings, he doesn't even own what is closest to a monopoly (Google's search business is the closest thing to a monopoly I know of short of state run firms in other countries).
Buffet on the"moat"
“The most important thing [is] trying to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it … protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle…”
“long-lasting” — durable for many years."
On Apple (and his general philosophy):
"…people have this incredible stickiness of — with the product. I mean, if they bring in an iPhone, they buy a new iPhone. I mean, they’re … it just has that quality. It gets built into their lives. Now, that doesn’t mean something can’t come along that will disrupt it. But the continuity of the product is huge, and the degree to which their lives center around it is huge. And it’s a pretty nice franchise to have with a consumer product.”
He doesn't mention monopoly, his holdings aren't a monopoly (his biggest holding Apple is certainly not a monopoly), he relies on brand power, "stickiness" of the product(will it be ubiquitous in people's lives), excellent management. Again that is not a monopolistic view, that's finding the right management players who command a market through better pricing or a product that has staying power in people's lives. But it is something he will drop in a second if a disrupter of a product comes along (Blackberry --> Apple comes along with the iPhone).
Buffett's biggest equity holding, Apple, is because of the very reasons stated. with Monopoly not being one.
Even harder for me because my holdings are in my IRA so I'm paying income tax rates when I withdraw.
AAPL has underperformed for the last 10 years through groupthink management. We need new leadership to take this company forward as right now I don't think it's maximizing shareholder value. I want Cook to resign.
At the moment, yes. And in the long term just holding it, yes. I think it is a great investment. But mid term? IMHO very Iffy.
Apple has 2 more quarters with semi-relatively easy to beat YoY revenue comps.
They'll be announcing Q3 results in less than 3 weeks. Expectations of 72 Billion. Previous Q3 was 59 Billion.
Analysts expectation 81 billion for Q4(Jul-Sep). Previous Q4 was 64 billion.
If they hit expectations, that's a YoY of around 20% or better revenue growth. That's excellent growth. And they're buying back 3 to 4 % of their stock shares. All signs point to up, the stock is going up? Hmmm...
Wall Street generally prices in or attempts to price in near term performance. Generally a stock price reflects more toward perceived growth in two or three or longer outward quarters. For example, Apple's Q2 results absolutely shattered expectations, a 40% outperform. The stock then proceeded to immediately fall 10 to 15 percent over the next several weeks (in part because Wall Street had priced it in and also perceived this was an over performance blip).
Upcoming Q1, the holiday quarter, has a YoY 2020 comp of 111 billion. 111 billion, JHFC. While I think we'll see upward stock price trend for a month or two, be prepared afterwards to see some sideways or even downward trend in the stock price. Wall Street doesn't like not beating your previous YoY quarter.ly revenue. 111 billion is one mega serious hurdle to exceed (Microsoft's entire full year revenue is around 160 billion in comparison). Any minor slip in iPhone revenue or Services revenue? That'll be perceived likely very sharply negatively.
Macro economic factors are the wildcard(recession, etc). Abut if by some incredible occurrence Apple could do 125 billion revenue in Q1. The stock will ride at a new level that will make stockholders very happy.
33 isn’t high for industry leading tech with massive services. High are AMZN, TSLA, NVDA, NFLX, CRM, etc.
I will say that whoever goes on to run Apple in the future needs to at least have some background in logistics and supply chain management.