Apple's Stock Sets First New All-Time High Closing Price in Nearly Two Years

[thettareddast]

Maybe I don't understand the stock market, but doesn't the share price go higher because of people's demand on the hope they will buy it today to sell it at more tomorrow?

at $700B , how much more can it grow really?

one can also get income via dividend payments

 

[Franshans]

Yet Tim can't figure out how to make a Mac

doesn´t need to maybe
[doublepost=1487083639][/doublepost]

You can only run on fumes for so long.

You can only run on fumes for so long.

Nice video. but no parallels to Apple. Apple kind of owns the industry, everybody is following Appl´s steps since more than 10 years. They hardly could have done any better.
Their products receivethe highest satisfacton rates.
Personal wishes not coming true are no measurement.

 

[tubeexperience]

doesn´t need to maybe
[doublepost=1487083639][/doublepost]


Nice video. but no parallels to Apple. Apple kind of owns the industry, everybody is following Appl´s steps since more than 10 years. They hardly could have done any better.
Their products receivethe highest satisfacton rates.
Personal wishes not coming true are no measurement.

Lol. Apple is no longer a trendsetter.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Awesome. My post was a bit tongue in cheek. Maybe that didn't come through. My point was just that in the market you can't entirely count your investment a success until you sell it. There are plenty of investors who road Blackberry's stock up to great heights and then back down to a loss.

Here, you obviously haven't done that since you've turned your good fortune into material goods. Seems like you still have a large amount though.

FYI, we are on the same page on investing and market timing. Though personally while I know the research about how even professional investors can't time the market, I probably am a bit guilty of it myself. It is human nature. As for Apple, I sold 20% because I wanted to significantly increase my cash position. I've been a bit unbalanced in part because the stock market and Apple has gone up a lot in the last several years. And I've been doing lots of house repairs, which uses cash. I just felt the need for a bigger buffer. It wasn't that I thought my Apple stock would go down. If I did think that Apple was going down a lot, I would (A) have sold all of it or (B) ignored my own thinking because what the heck do I know. Option B would probably be the better of the two because it would save me a lot of capital gains.

Sure, I get what you are saying, and yes, my portfolio is still quite out of balance. I am taking on a lot more risk than I need or want, so the cure is to move more AAPL, for that reason alone.

If you've been in AAPL for as long as I have, you'll remember the big hits it's taken over the last 20 years. The first was in 2000 (or was it 2001?) when it dropped 30% in one after-hours session, and then went lower. Would that have been a good time to sell? Then again in 2009. And again in 2015. Would any of those been good selling opportunities? Basic human instinct is to follow the herd and anybody who thinks they are a true contrarian who can read peaks and valleys is probably kidding themselves.

I don't give myself that kind of credit, if only because I know that even the people who spend their entire lives trying to read and time the markets are pretty poor at it. More often, you are going to do just the opposite of what you should be doing because your emotions (fear and greed) are feeding your decision-making more than you will ever know.

The tactic that has worked for me in managing my investments is a certain amount of deliberate ignorance. I do not look at my portfolio daily, or even weekly. Sometimes, not even monthly. I avoid staring into the hairy eyeball of the market to try to figure out what it is telling me. I am aware its hypnotic affect will cause me to do stupid things. I am not superhuman and I know it.

The ETF program I've been into for the last several years is basically set-and-forget. You select a risk level (equities vs. bonds), push the button and walk away. They buy you into a dozen or so low-cost passively managed ETFs that cover the entire market and keep them balanced. It is a blissfully dull method of investing. I can highly recommend it, especially if you've had your stomach in your mouth a few too many times over the years.

 

[Rocketman]

Sounds legit. Do you have any current buy recommendations?

I don't make non-Apple recommendations in public. Apple is so widely held nothing I say can make an appreciable difference to the price.

A June 2017 AAPL Call Option with a 145 strike is only $2.03 today ($203 per contract) and has enough open interest to be fairly liquid going out and is far less capital or risk than the stock itself.

The 150 strike is only $1.15. I have heard plenty of analysts claim AAPL should be at 185.00. That's not outlandish for a major iPhone cycle year.

Any gain will be ordinary income unless you have the sort of IRA or Roth that allows option trades.

As an example, after posting this I did an options trade to put my money where my mouth is.

20 AAPL 16 Jun 2017 155 Call $1445.48. As of this morning at 6:40am Pacific, it is worth $1840.00. A 27.3% return in under a day or annualised at 9,962%. Compound that!

 

[TallManNY]

I don't listen to studies. Studies can come to any conclusion they want. It's never scientific.

Macs are useless in my place of work, that's why we have over 75,000 PC's out there. All centrally managed, deployed & maintened by Microsoft's SCCM.



It's a bit of a myth that Macs have a lifespan that is longer than a PC. It was true 15+ years ago, but not today. Plus Apple decide to artificially End of Life certain Macs that are easily capable of running the latest version of macOS. PC's and Macs pretty much have the same guts inside and a decent specced PC can last 8+ years no problem. The good thing about old PC's is that many of them (including laptops) can be upgraded at minimal cost. So a machine that is 4/5 years old can easily get a new lease of life by added a SSD or more memory for example. Good luck trying that with a Mac.

I also would argue that the reselling price of Macs are much lower than they used to be. 6 or 7 years ago you could resell your Mac after 2 years for about 70% of the original cost. You have absolutely no chance of doing that now. The most economical way to run a Mac is buy the base spec (and not spend £200-£1000+ on configurable options), sell it after 2 years and you might be lucky to claw back 50% of the original cost. But who buys a computer to worry about how much it will be worth in a few years time? It's a consumable item, not a car.

Don't get me wrong, I love Macs, but for the average user and in the enterprise, a Mac never made sense for the masses and certainly not in business. The studies that suggest otherwise are wrong.

I operate on a completely smaller scale than you (dozens of employees instead of tens of thousands). But I've been using PCs for years at work and was part of larger companies. Generally those companies seemed to replace PCs every three years or so. While my friends and family seem to be getting five to as much as ten years of use from their Macs at home (I tend to keep my Macs four to six years and the trend is that this time is growing). I assume the work laptops that we would hand back after two or three years got sold off (or maybe they were leased from Dell or whatever in the first place), so they probably had further useful life. But by year three it wasn't worth upgrading them or even buying the latest version of Windows for them. But still my own experience is using PCs for short periods of time and Macs for much longer.

Watching IT try to service PCs is painful though. And while my co-workers have all used PCs professionally, they all use Macs at home and the younger ones all used Macs in school. Somehow they all need IT help to do anything on their PCs but they can get their Macs at home to function. So I'm also not surprised that tech support costs are much lower for Mac users than for Windows users.

Maybe the big companies will never switch off of PCs. But if I were starting a business from scratch, I think I'd issue Macs to my employees. Until you can afford a full-time IT guy or are ready to regularly bring in a consultant, I just don't think you can use PCs if your employees aren't tech savvy.
[doublepost=1487098448][/doublepost]

Sure, I get what you are saying, and yes, my portfolio is still quite out of balance. I am taking on a lot more risk than I need or want, so the cure is to move more AAPL, for that reason alone.

If you've been in AAPL for as long as I have, you'll remember the big hits it's taken over the last 20 years. The first was in 2000 (or was it 2001?) when it dropped 30% in one after-hours session, and then went lower. Would that have been a good time to sell? Then again in 2009. And again in 2015. Would any of those been good selling opportunities? Basic human instinct is to follow the herd and anybody who thinks they are a true contrarian who can read peaks and valleys is probably kidding themselves.

I don't give myself that kind of credit, if only because I know that even the people who spend their entire lives trying to read and time the markets are pretty poor at it. More often, you are going to do just the opposite of what you should be doing because your emotions (fear and greed) are feeding your decision-making more than you will ever know.

The tactic that has worked for me in managing my investments is a certain amount of deliberate ignorance. I do not look at my portfolio daily, or even weekly. Sometimes, not even monthly. I avoid staring into the hairy eyeball of the market to try to figure out what it is telling me. I am aware its hypnotic affect will cause me to do stupid things. I am not superhuman and I know it.

The ETF program I've been into for the last several years is basically set-and-forget. You select a risk level (equities vs. bonds), push the button and walk away. They buy you into a dozen or so low-cost passively managed ETFs that cover the entire market and keep them balanced. It is a blissfully dull method of investing. I can highly recommend it, especially if you've had your stomach in your mouth a few too many times over the years.

That is lots of discipline to not check your portfolio. But recognizing you are human is a big first step. I personally can't help it but check Apple's stock price every day. On the other hand my basic investment thesis is the strength of iOS. Unless I see real weakness there, I'm not selling. And I'm likely going to question my ability to understand that weakness anyway. So I'm likely only to sell for rebalance or some need to buy something (e.g., pay for retirement). I'm basically never buying any more Apple stock either, because I'm already overweight by a lot. Remember it is a big piece of various funds and market indexes as well.

I only started taking a position in Apple's stock a little under a decade ago. So I've mainly experienced a general increase. Before that I was strictly a mutual fund investor. Aside from mutual funds fitting my investment philosophy, my job restricted my ability to buy and sell individual stocks. I needed to get clearance on each trade. So I had to get the okay to buy Apple's stock and would have had to get another okay to sell it. I wish I had bought in earlier but it was a hassle to buy stocks and as we've discussed picking a specific winning investment is really hard for the pros and the especially the laypeople. But I should have bought as soon as I had a chance to use an iPhone. That was just so clearly a great item.

If I were to guess about the stock though, I think Congress will pass a tax amnesty program allowing Apple and other U.S. companies to bring back cash overseas without paying U.S. taxes (or perhaps paying significantly reduced taxes). Apple will then issue the "mother of all" dividends. I think that will happen this year (amnesty part, not necessarily the dividend) and it will be very interesting.

 

[Rocketman]

and the Dow is at an all time high too. The next bubble is slowly starting to grow. Anyone notice that the stock market took off after the election? The stock market is nothing but hopes + and fears -.

Not entirely. The stock market is a 6 month advance discounting mechanism. So a variety of folks see higher organic earnings and higher net earnings from promised tax rate reductions and increased immediate deductability. The market did have a switch in sentiment as a result of the election and the promised policy changes. So far it appears those promises will be kept due to political strength.

Avoid bonds in a rising rate environment. Buy banks on weakness.

 

[Codeseven]

Whoa, according to CNBC just now, Berkshire Hathaway just bought an 'additional' 42 Million (yup, MILLION!) shares of Apple. Folks there with bigger brains than me must be pretty confident in Apple's future.

 

[triton100]

No, the revolutionary products are already on the horizon, but Apple is not the lead this time. The self-driving cars, the AI assistants at home, the VR solutions. Apple on these fronts is playing catch at the best, but at a very far distance behind the leaders.

How do you know this ? I mean apples plans and whether they are playing catch up ? No one knows for sure what they are cooking ?

 

[IJ Reilly]

That is lots of discipline to not check your portfolio. But recognizing you are human is a big first step. I personally can't help it but check Apple's stock price every day. On the other hand my basic investment thesis is the strength of iOS. Unless I see real weakness there, I'm not selling. And I'm likely going to question my ability to understand that weakness anyway. So I'm likely only to sell for rebalance or some need to buy something (e.g., pay for retirement). I'm basically never buying any more Apple stock either, because I'm already overweight by a lot. Remember it is a big piece of various funds and market indexes as well.

I only started taking a position in Apple's stock a little under a decade ago. So I've mainly experienced a general increase. Before that I was strictly a mutual fund investor. Aside from mutual funds fitting my investment philosophy, my job restricted my ability to buy and sell individual stocks. I needed to get clearance on each trade. So I had to get the okay to buy Apple's stock and would have had to get another okay to sell it. I wish I had bought in earlier but it was a hassle to buy stocks and as we've discussed picking a specific winning investment is really hard for the pros and the especially the laypeople. But I should have bought as soon as I had a chance to use an iPhone. That was just so clearly a great item.

If I were to guess about the stock though, I think Congress will pass a tax amnesty program allowing Apple and other U.S. companies to bring back cash overseas without paying U.S. taxes (or perhaps paying significantly reduced taxes). Apple will then issue the "mother of all" dividends. I think that will happen this year (amnesty part, not necessarily the dividend) and it will be very interesting.

I don't know if it's discipline so much as a reflexive duck-and-cover exercise. Knowing my net worth doesn't help me sleep at night unless it went up that day. I even avoid visiting Apple news web sites that think we need a real-time AAPL stock ticker. It's news I can't use.

Yeah, I think you put your finger on a big part of the current run-up in AAPL. Microsoft dropped a big one-time dividend onto their stock holders a number of years ago and I can see Apple doing the same if they get to "repatriate" more of their stranded profits.

 

[triton100]

Probably I've spoken to most of your points already in my previous post, but just to hammer it home a little more sharply, I don't worry about picking the exact right moment to sell as far as the market is concerned, I do it for my own reasons. I've already parted with about a third of my initial AAPL purchase. Over the last few years, it bought me an airplane, hangar to put it in, and most recently, a new car (they really should all have Apple stickers on them). The rest after paying the taxes goes into the aforementioned ETFs, which whenever I can get myself out of the habit of working, will be set up to pay a monthly income. No family likely to survive me, so whatever I have left when I shuffle off goes to my favorite nonprofits and charities.

Sounds like a plan. I'll have dibs on the plane.
[doublepost=1487112872][/doublepost]

Lol. Apple is no longer a trendsetter.

When companies steal your innovation it's easier for them to reinvest their r and d into new ideas and then have people like you claim that these companies are much more innovative. They've had an easy head start through the thefts.
[doublepost=1487113136][/doublepost]

I don't make non-Apple recommendations in public. Apple is so widely held nothing I say can make an appreciable difference to the price.

A June 2017 AAPL Call Option with a 145 strike is only $2.03 today ($203 per contract) and has enough open interest to be fairly liquid going out and is far less capital or risk than the stock itself.

The 150 strike is only $1.15. I have heard plenty of analysts claim AAPL should be at 185.00. That's not outlandish for a major iPhone cycle year.

Any gain will be ordinary income unless you have the sort of IRA or Roth that allows option trades.

Do you anticipate a major new category product release in the form of auto mobility or some form or AR in 2018, as it's time for the next 7 or so year super cycle of major new innovation, in order to move the needle i.e. imac. Ipod. iPhone. iPad. And next...

 

[MacBH928]

one can also get income via dividend payments

well correct me if I am wrong but if Apple pays $0.52 per share and the share price is $135 that means you will be have a profit of 0.38% return on investment... am I right? You better keep your money at the bank

 

[Rocketman]

Do you anticipate a major new category product release in the form of auto mobility or some form or AR in 2018, as it's time for the next 7 or so year super cycle of major new innovation, in order to move the needle i.e. imac. Ipod. iPhone. iPad. And next...

Carplay is just getting traction this year for the first time. Maybe by V3.0 it will be as big as Watch or TV.

TV morphed into an app experience, and at the same time TV viewing has morphed to a mobile over the air experience for most viewers. Apple is centrally located for mobile TV with sufficiently powerful processors and fast wireless. Time for the networks to catch up.

iPhone is an under appreciated ANNUITY for Apple with a reinvest the dividends quality as the user base grows steadily over the years and updating on average every 2 years!

Mac just steadily grows.

Buy AAPL on dips.

Look for growth in services and later enterprise services.

Albert Einstein called compound interest "the greatest mathematical discovery of all time". We think this is true partly because, unlike the trigonometry or calculus you studied back in high school, compounding can be applied to everyday life. The wonder of compounding (sometimes called "compound interest") transforms your working money into a state-of-the-art, highly powerful income-generating tool. Compounding is the process of generating earnings on an asset's reinvested earnings. To work, it requires two things: the re-investment of earnings and time. The more time you give your investments, the more you are able to accelerate the income potential of your original investment, which takes the pressure off of you.

 

[TallManNY]

well correct me if I am wrong but if Apple pays $0.52 per share and the share price is $135 that means you will be have a profit of 0.38% return on investment... am I right? You better keep your money at the bank

That is a per quarter dividend. So multiple that number by four. So you get $2 per share and now you are getting income that is a bit higher than the bank. Also it is likely that Apple will gradually announce larger dividends as a pure dollar amount. Company's are very cautious about changing these things because they want their dividend to be very predictable (or at least never go down). But as Apple buys back shares, they can take the same amount of revenue and allocate it to the lesser remaining shares. So I bet that dividend quickly becomes $0.55!

Yeah, the dividend ain't a lot of money no matter how you cut it. But . . . .

There is a good likelihood that Congress will pass a tax amnesty allowing U.S. companies to repatriate oversea money without paying U.S. taxes. Honestly, I can't really see a reason why that wouldn't happen. Tax cuts are main goal of the Republican Party. Almost all economic theory says that this will boost the U.S. economy (there are differing opinions as to how much). And bringing cash from overseas into the U.S. is fully consistent with Trump's America First philosophy. There are some arguments in the negative, but they are all long-term issues and issues associated with maintaining U.S. tax revenue. But I can't see any of the current folks leading government really caring about those things.

Apple could then do a huge one-time dividend. I think the amnesty comes this year and the big Apple dividend comes next year.

 

[Greymacuser]

And yet thy still price their out of date products as if they are a struggling company in the 1990's.