“Apple Inc. has bought $14 billion of its own shares in the two weeks since reporting financial results that disappointed Wall Street, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an interview,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Cook said Apple was ‘surprised’ by the 8% decline in its shares on Jan. 28, the day after it reported lower iPhone sales than projected and warned that revenue in the current quarter might decline from the same period a year ago. Mr. Cook said he wanted to be ‘aggressive’ and ‘opportunistic.'”
“With the latest purchases, Mr. Cook said Apple had bought back more than $40 billion of its shares over the past 12 months, which Mr. Cook said was a record for any company over a similar span,” Wakabayashi reports. “Those purchases are part of Apple’s previously disclosed plan to repurchase $60 billion of its own shares, Mr. Cook said. He said Apple bought $12 billion of the shares through an ‘accelerated’ repurchase program, and $2 billion on the open market. He said Apple plans to disclose “updates” to its buyback program in March or April.”
“The Apple CEO said its history of opting for smaller deals doesn’t mean that the company won’t pull the trigger on a big acquisition if it makes sense,” Wakabayashi reports. “‘We’ve looked at big companies,’ said Mr. Cook. “‘We have no problem spending 10 figures for the right company, for the right fit that’s in the best interest of Apple in the long-term. None. Zero.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz,” “David E.,” Dan K.,” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
yes!!!! All those day trading manipulators have less to play with. Real fans hold AAPL for the long term.
G,
Well, a… yes, and…a… NO. As a famous lady actress once answered if she was a virgin on her wedding day. LOL
While I do not trade shares in my 401K as the company holding them is as slow as honey in winter acting on trades, I have started keeping a few shares in one of the commercial trade houses. Sold a few shares at $550 before the quarter report and bought them back for $500 two days later.
If you cannot fight the ba*tards, sometimes you have to join them. 🙁 sadly.
The general term for people timing stock trades is “contributor.” The ba*tards practice every day and have information the rest of us do not. We can beat them, but not at their own game.
Well said brotha….and well played Mr. Timmy!!
Well played Sir!
Hmm.. I guess that could be a major reason for the $12 (a bit over 2%) of their price AAPL recovered so far this week.
Icahn must already be writing his open letter of dissapointment… More, more, MOOOOORE!!
I really don’t understand why Apple doesn’t just spend all $60 billion of its buyback program when it was at around $440 per share. Their first purchase was around $40, then it was $480, now its probably around $500. The next time they buy will be even higher.
You can tell Tim Cook is clueless when he was surprised Apple’s share price fell on earnings. It shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. It was a given investors would dump. He should have been listening to Wall Street’s expectations of iPhone sales.
There’s no guarantee Apple’s share price will go higher at all. Apple can easily go lower. Investors who are not confident in Apple’s guidance will wisely take out more money. Not everyone is as stupid as Icahn gambling that Apple might go up within the next couple of quarters. It’s much easier to take Apple down over that period of time. There’s plenty of better pickin’s than Apple. Even profitless Amazon will recover its losses faster than Apple will.
Wall Street will upgrade AAPL in next couple weeks.
Maybe he has yet to grasp the level of manipulation. AKAM bare beats today and is under threat that Apple will bring. content distribution in house, yet jumps 20%. The reason Apple dropped to where it did was to wipe out the call option buyers at every level. The MM jerked the stock down from the get go. It wasn’t like there was 1 billion shares for sale at market that MM had to clear. Once it dumped the cabal just ket the pressure on unitl the calls were wiped out. After earnings, put call ratio increeased and the MM started screwing the option put buyers. 80% probability that AAPL closes at 505 to 507 tomorrow just to scree the option gmaers. 10 for 1 split would make it extremely less lucrative because the number of contracts would need to increse 10 fold for the same effect, greatly increasing transactions costs. Then MM could move thier game to GOOG which does less than 10% of APPLe share and option volume.
Here is the evidence of manipulation
http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0910
Dear RBF, Please tell samsung I said hello. They are just doing so well in the market, you must be totally pleased. LOL
Just a thought to you (and a few others) here that have NO CLUE as to how the rules go vs companies and the SEC. Companies have inside information on what they are doing, so any stock trades have to be semi uncontrolled.
Selling or buying BILLIONS of dollars of stock will affect price and must be done with out fore knowledge of company moves.
Just saying.
I have always wondered, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to buy back the whole company. Then Wallstreet can fuck off and we can all stop reading boring stories about the share price?
Even Apple doesn’t have enough cash to buy back the entire company at a high share price. It’d be utter folly to sacrifice your war chest *and* saddle your company with an unsustainable amount of debt there is no guarantee it would be able to service down the road.
The short answer is that Apple simply can’t “buy itself”. Each share Apple buys to take out of circulation increases the value of the remaining shares in the hands of shareholders. (If Apple were to buy all but the one last share, the owner of that share would be the lone owner of Apple Inc.
Taking Apple private would take external money.
“it reported lower iPhone sales than projected .”
Lower than ANAL-Ists projected, not Apple.
CNBC Anal-ists mainly.
Well noticed anyone would think that the analysts were talking on behalf of the company these days, no one seems to distinguish it any more.
And at a substantially higher-than-expected average selling price per phone due to favorable mix. Basically, analysts wanted to see 4 million more phones sold, yet revenue, profit, and EPS pretty much met or exceeded expectations on the lower-than-analysts-guided number, as I recall.
Just buy Disney…please?
..or Ford Motor Company.
Or Adobe. And OWN the desktop publishing market.
Yes, buy Adobe and fix it.
Start by burying flash
Disney gets them all the Disney movie, music, and TV content, plus Pixar and Lucasfilm. It also gets them ABC and ESPN, as well as the History channel, and a list of about 200 lesser known content companies. What does Ford get them? Sprint would make more sense than Ford. Sprint owns Clearwire’s wireless frequency licenses that can reach about 80% of the world’s population.
It also gets them a half dozen movie studios which are all under the Disney umbrella.
kinda half-way joking, but would like to see someone with ’s innovation to create a new type of car.
An Apple designed car would be a killer. Voice controls for radio, wipers and lights that are automatically controlled, built in system diagnostic displays and analysis, built in Siri style navigation and maps. Voice controlled ECU modes (Siri…race mode please!) would be nice. Rear view camera, radar detector, collision avoidance, and near-object recognition built in and automatic. A built in garage door opener remote…Hell, a whole house remote, lights, locks, etc. I could go on forever…
Apple should just buy HBO and offer a free subscription on Apple TV. HBO is one of the only reasons people hesitate to cut the cord. Buy shelling out a few tenths of a percent of their war chest for this acquisition, Apple could take the cable companies out of the TV equation overnight.
Brilliant that would b brilliant. C’mon Apple rock the TV!
Good idea, just as long as all Apple TV owners get to watch Game of Thrones for free !
Never had HBO and never cared.
HBO and ESPN would put everyone else in the industry out of business.
One of the main drivers in this market, which of course the brilliant journalists that give us daily reasons why the market is up or down have failed to realize, is due to pension plan rebalancing.
The run up in stock prices and increase in discount rates has brought many pension plans to near full funding. These plans are aggressively re-balancing to lock in some of the significant gains and move to a more liability driven investment scheme that will greatly favor bonds.
Unfortunately, the federal government, accounting profession and wall street have all acted in lock step to kill defined benefit pension plans. I for one am sorry to see such well thought out financial backstop for people simply thrown out and replaced with high fee no safeguarded 401k plans that companies routinely suspend contributions for. This is another key fiber of the US economy damaged irreparably whose full impact we will not see for the another 20 years or so.
How is this related to the article.
Discusses decline in stock value, and frankly, it was lightly influenced by Apple earnings, but the broader market sell off as well as sell off for Apple is being heavily influenced by “professional investors”, which includes pension plan investment managers.
TESLA
iOwn A bunch of Tesla proud to say, along with AAPL
I think it would be a great investment but i know Elon would not sell cheap
Tim surprised? What a revelation! Surprised, my ass.