“No one complains about volatility when it works in their favor,” Chuck Jaffe writes for MarketWatch. “A 1,000-point loss on the Dow Jones Industrial Average might panic investors, but a 1,000-point gain — the same percentage move, just in a different direction — would not ring their alarm bells. Likewise, few people blinked when Apple was reaching a 52-week high above $700 per share last year.”
“No one complained, because not only were they benefiting from the stock’s run, but return numbers for the S&P 500 and other indexes paled when presented with Apple’s benefits removed. Quarter after quarter, you could find graphs of the S&P’s earnings versus the previous year, and more than half of the growth for the 500 stocks was created just by the biggest one,” Jaffe writes. “Now, however, the worm has turned. Apple is down roughly 40% since it peaked last fall, and it dropped more than 12% just on Thursday alone.”
Jaffe writes, “‘If this recent drop-off has some investors worried, then maybe they should look at overlap and portfolio concentration,’ [said Geoff Bobroff, an industry consultant in East Greenwich, R.I.], ‘but long-term they still have big gains to show, and they would not have wanted to miss out on Apple’s run-up, so maybe it shows them that sometimes you have to take the bad with the good to get the best long-term results.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Shut up, Chuck.
