Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL) has been downgraded to “peer perform” from “outperform” by Bear Stearns based on valuation.
Bear Stearns has maintained estimates with a share price target of $70 and noted that the firm is “still encouraged by emerging opportunities, such as Intel-based Macs, iPod shuffle refresh and the emergence of iPod as a media platform.”
Full article here.
Bears Stearns is too conservative on AAPL. They’ll take that as a compliment, but their price targets have been behind the curve for awhile now. Other firms have much higher price targets on AAPL that are already in the low $80s. The good news for prospective and current AAPL shareholders would be if this action by Stearns can manage to induce a bit of a buying opportunity, but the market might just shrug this one off knowing Stearns’ very conservative stance on AAPL.
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Bear Stearns reiterates Apple ‘outperform’ rating, raises target to $70; AAPL hits new all-time high – November 16, 2005
It will be back to 75 by next week. Hold!
Analyst opinion WITHOUT supporting data is minimally useful.
Bear Sterns gives us only their reputation as reason to follow their guidance. They don’t say WHY the stock is undervalued. If the report indicated that there were manufacturing constraints and AAPL would only ship 8M iPods, that would be a reason. This is no reason.
These Bozo’s want it to drop, as they want to put their Christmas bonus on it and then when the next reselts come in for the next 1/4, they’ve made a killing on it. That’s their business.
Someone forgot about Macworld obviously, they must use PC’s then. Fools.
Or trying to free up some big blocks of shares to buy?
http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/
“It will be back to 75 by next week. Hold!”
Um, it’s 74.98 right now. What do you mean by ‘back’?
sweet. gonna get me some apple stock for xmas!
mw – “fine” as in “what a fine time to buy more AAPL stock”
dang slow marketwatch update. Ok, its down now, Im betting back up by EOD.
Profit taking… sigh…
They’re just releasing a press release to cover their butts.
These analysts are absolute idiots. The stock will be above $80 by January 12th (the day after MacWorld). Where do they get these target “projections” from anyway? The damn stock is well above $70 already…
Actually, Apple’s stock needs to get back to a representation of reality as opposed to the frenetic goldrush that’s been going on for the last couple of weeks.
Whilst I have no doubt that Apple is capable of maintaining an $85 price, the first thing they have to do is deliver a $5-$5.5 billion quarter for the current quarter, which would require around 10 million iPods to change hands at around $220.00 a piece ($2.2 billion), 1.4 million Macintosh CPUs at around $1250.00 ($1.75 billion) and another $1.25 billion in music, displays, warranties, et al.
This has to be the cornerstone quarter of Apple’s financial year and hitting these marks (and around $550 million in profit) has a big say in whether Apple deserves a valuation of $70 billion + – so personally I’d lay off now until the results get declared around the 11th January.
In my opinion, the best of the AAPL watchers is UBS Warburg , CSFB, Piper Jaffray and Deutsche Bank. Piper isn’t afraid to stick its neck out there and make that “wild” call. Back before the split PJ targeted $100, when everybody else was struggling with $60. Today AAPL is trading at a split adjusted $140.
UBS Warburg seems to be the most active watcher. They have upgraded AAPL each of the last four months. Some analysts haven’t upgraded AAPL at all during that time frame (at least not publicly).
UBS leads the pack with a target of $86, followed by CSFB at $82.
My personal target is $90.