In the News II

Quote: AZDuffman

The oil is just one example. But I repeat, worry not, they will inflate it away. $1000 for a Big Mac, but no default.

That's funny.

If the scam continues, I'll get out of dollars soon so I'll pretend to worry from afar.

I think we defaulted in the early 1930s so they confiscated all the gold like criminals.

It's a bad day when Gene Munster says he'd rather own Apple over Amazon and the markets react oppositely.

That likely means he has an monetary incentive, somewhere.

He's a perma-bull.

Quote: DoubleGold

I wonder if those young reddit traders bought AAPL at the top before earnings came out a little while ago.

We could have bought APPL at $3.00 in 2009.

Today it has a market cap in excess of $3 trillion.

It added $1 trillion in market cap over the past twelve months.

Apple's market cap is higher than the GDP of most nations.

The same as France, and much higher than the GDP for Italy, Spain, Russia and Netherlands.

It could overtake the UK and India in a year.

Quote: Tanko

We could have bought APPL at $3.00 in 2009.

Today it has a market cap in excess of $3 trillion.

It added $1 trillion in market cap over the past twelve months.

Apple's market cap is higher than the GDP of most nations.

The same as France, and much higher than the GDP for Italy, Spain, Russia and Netherlands.

It could overtake the UK and India in a year.

My sense after AAPL hitting a new high the other day while revenue declined for two quarters (now a third Q), is there's still too much cash in the system.


I'm showing a PE of 32.72.

For a firm with declining revenue and as large as she is, PE should be about 11-12.

It's only about a $1.2T market cap firm priced at $3T because of the excess cash in the system.

But if revenue is falling, I'd expect to see lower valuations than that.

Investing and/or trading with all this Covid cash in the system is completely different.

But even before Covid, there was too much cash in the system.


It shows up in speculative percentage movements and in high PEs for large market cap firms.

Folks chasing liquidity.

Also, the AI hype is like having more cash in the system.

What that means is, firms like AAPL with declining revenue can have PEs around 40-50.

So the excess valuations must be respected.

If revenues are increasing, the PEs can be higher.


At least until everyone is done speculating with Covid money.

for a good 30 years I've dismissed the idea of investing heavily into any of the FAANG stocks. Apple in particular I thought was risky

turns out that ... well, you know.

I have pretty consistently been too conservative, way too much money in bonds instead of stocks. Yet, every time stocks go down I experience the horrors [not much anymore though, more like feeling sick inside, instead of horror] At the same time I wish for buying opportunities LOL. Yet I know few personally, anybody of my acquaintance I mean, who has invested in the stock market like I have. Mostly though I have to guess, see if they talk about it, some apparently have, and some might surprise me.

So I don't go around giving advice. If you want some anyway, all I can give is be sure to invest all you can* in stocks, skipping bonds if you are young, and if you diversify well, quit worrying about risk.

* you do have to be sure you won't need the money, or what happens is you invest in good times and withdraw in bad times, which tends to be a case of buying high and selling low

I'm Still Standing, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah [it's an old guy chant for me]

I'm against diversifying.


There's two exceptions.

When moving money in or out of something and the market moves against you before your move is complete.

Like if you're a billionaire and hitting the bid on a mid-size market cap firm, the bid will keep dropping.

That's when to diversify or just stay with larger firms that can handle the volume.

Diversification is for folks with large amounts of assets.

The other exception is hedging.

Pretty funny stuff.


Barclays maintains equal weight on AAPL with target of $167.

Citigroup maintains buy with $240 target.



I noticed on earnings week before the earnings report is released, the bankers will take turns, one or two each day, increasing the target price of the stock.

Like they're in a banking cartel.


So in the above example, it could be that Barclays doesn't have skin in the game.

Quote: DoubleGold

Barclays maintains equal weight on AAPL with target of $167.

Citigroup maintains buy with $240 target.

I'll go with Citigroup. Strong Buy.

Buy and Hold.

Apple owns 55% of the US smartphone market, and there are 1.5 billion I-phone users world-wide. All those phones and the accessories that people pair with them, are eventually going to be replaced by newer models.

Their next star product is going to be the fully autonomous Apple Car.