“Apple Computer continues to charge higher, using the steadfast support of its ascending 10-day and 20-day moving averages. In fact, the shares have ramped more than 158 percent since the start of the year, lifted by the support of their 10-week and 20-week trendlines. The stock is now trading at its highest level since September 2000 and has outperformed the Nasdaq Composite since mid-December. The security is moving back into contention with former resistance at the 60 level,” Jocelynn Drake writes for Schaeffers Research’s “Street Chatter.”
“Considering its amazing technical performance, you would expect to see an abundance of optimism among traders. Not quite. Options players have exhibited a growing preference for puts when it comes to AAPL. The equity’s Schaeffer’s put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) currently rest at 0.88 and is higher than all but four percent of those taken over the past 52 weeks. Wall Street is also showing a surprising reluctance to jump on AAPL’s bandwagon. According to Zacks, seven of the 17 analysts following the firm still rate it a “hold.” Any upgrades from this hesitant group could spur further gains in the shares. The only bunch that has thrown in the towel appears to be short sellers, as the number of AAPL shares sold short plunged by 17 percent in October to 12.3 million shares. According to our Equity Scorecard (available via Schaeffer’s Gold, AAPL currently carries a rating of 8.0, indicating that the shares remain an excellent bullish opportunity as pessimism continues to linger on this stellar technical performer,” Drake writes.
More info and charts here.
Yeah, but all it takes is one hiccup. All it takes is for the media to turn on Apple and poof. The media killed the Cube and there was nothing wrong with that computer. It was ahead of it’s time. It cracks me up when I see people calling for a “headless iMac” these days.
Wall Street knows its own history with Apple and they know that they’ve in no small part helped to hold the company back and keep the stock price down through their irrational treatment.
It’s no surprise they’d be very cautious.
Whoah. I was first post? I’m never first post. Oh man and I wasted it. You can set the tone for the entire onslaught of following messages if you’re first post. Man, I could have said something important, like “That government is best which govern’s least.”
The price was wrong with the cube.
theloniusMac…
Ye lead the masses with the first post, surely !
LOL…
Good to be quick on the keyboard, huh ??
Dont listen to these “experts”… AAPL ..the sky is the limit !!
Maybe it was a bit expensive, but most of the complaints were strange things like, “It’s not expandable.”
That computer was maligned from start to finish and it was a beautiful piece of work. If you look back, it was the harbinger of Apple to come.
Maybe if it has been all white…
You know, I didn’t understand a word of the article. Where is a good dictionary of “call/put and its ratio, sell short, moving average, and holds”, etc?
Mind you, it is not clear to me that those who babble these words have any clear understanding of what is going on, either.
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Mike
I own a cube and its more epandable than an emac or the current iMac. With todays smaller technologies the cube would even better, the only expandability problem is the non-full length grafx card slot, which the current cube lovers have fixed with a new case. A wonderful design, only the external power supply dissapoints me, but I think it was a technical issue for the time
I’m not all that much an authority on The Stock Market, but essentially all they are talking about in this article is MONEY. How can they make money from the AAPL stock. How much money will the AAPL stock make for us. How long should we hold this stock before it stops making money for me.
Don’t read too much into this speculation. Wall Street doesn’t give a shit about Apple Computer. All they care about is how much money AAPL is worth today and how much it will be worth tomorrow.
Jeez….
This thread has become just a tad too somber… !!
To lighten the mood…
Have you ever wondered what the top 10 songs found on Steve Ballmers (secret) iPod ??
CLick Here to find out !!
It’s sad that Apple works it’s tail end off to appease these Wall Street fools, but those same fools will praise the almighty Microsoft, who produces mediocre products and is valued on way too much hype.
I don’t get it.. the stock is kicking ass this year.. and waaay overvalued..
they just made a 100 mil profit.. and they’re at like 30 times earnings or something.. chill out.. wall street is being cautious not because they don’t think apple makes cool shit.. but because they don’t think apple make profitable shit.. the ipod jacked up apple’s price from 20’s to 55…
i dont get it..
All this article is saying is that using technical market (voodoo) signals, Apple stock should be going up more. But lots of invetors continue to shoot against it, with puts and calls (meaning they think it’s going to go down). Other investors, have recently been shooting against it with short selling, have gotten burned and have quit doing that.
The author isn’t sure why there is so much pessimistic sentiment against apple, given its performance and the technical signals.
(Full disclosure – I own aapl shares.)
Apple should make an all stock purchase of another technology company while the stock is riding high- Adobe would be a good choice. I think XM or Sirius would be a good choice and could fit in well with the iPod strategy. The company is worth well over $20 Billion right now and an all-stock purchase would improve the p/e ratio and make the Wall Street crowd happy.
The only thing surprising to me about Apple’s stock is that the stellar adjustment happened so suddenly. Like the market discovered its potential way after the good news was already out there! That’s a signal to my mind that analysts weren’t taking it seriously – for a long time back.
Because of that it’s likely to get a backward adjustment just as suddenly and it looks like they’re already anticipating it. Certainly the wrong time to buy. After the adjustment see steady growth and $100 barrier broken within 18 months.
NoPCZone:
Or � as I keep promoting � Macromedia and EMI.
Yours combined for less than the price of Adobe on its own.
Macromedia’s appeal should be obvious – a wide experience of developing or maintaining the development of new media creation tools, which is more interesting than the Adobe’s D&P reliance in so many ways.
The acquisition of EMI – which is now pretty much only a music company – would give Apple control of EMI and Virgin including the Parlophone/Charisma/Chrysalis/Harvest imprints as well as EMI Music Publishing.
Apple would then be taking more money out of iTMS sales, as well as taking a share of income from sales of EMI repetoire made through other online stores, as well as exploiting the physical repetoire.
There are so many other benefits to this option, that I cannot even begin to describe them in 2500 characters, and I have a life this weekend and don’t have the time.
Wall Street doesn’t understand Apple and unlike most other corps Wall Street has very little influence over Apple, they don’t like that. Apple is run more like a privately owned company, insulated from the market by it’s dominant CEO and large cash holding.
So when Wall Street comes out en masse and says Apple should do ‘X’ to sell more products Apple ignores them and carries on innovating. That pisses them off. Steve recently said customers are no.1 priority, The Street thinks that shareholders should be no.1. That pisses them off too.
So yes when Apple has a miss-step The Street hits the share price hard. When Apple does well it takes The Street a long while to get over their caution.
Share trading institutions make their money on volume, commission on shares sold. More sales = more profit, it’s that simple. When a company says selling more is not our no.1 priority The Street simply cannot comprehend.
Reluctant, yes, surprising, no.
Analysts do worse than random on stock picks, they’re only right 48% of the time, you’re better off sticking a pin in the list to select your investments.
Jocelynn Drake seems to misunderstand AAPL completely, applying trading analysis to a stock that doesn’t respond to the normal technical metrics.