“As expected, Apple (AAPL) had a very merry Christmas, posting the best quarter in its 32-year history, with earnings up 58% over the same quarter last year. But the good news fell on deaf ears in a market roiled by the broader meltdown,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt blogs for Fortune.
“And the company’s conservative projections for the next three months seems to have spooked investors attuned for signs of a coming recession. Apple’s shares, having closed at 155.64, down 3.5% for the day, plunged more than 12% in after-hours trading. At one point the stock hit 136.75, a four-month low,” Elmer-DeWitt reports.
“If this were any other company, the market’s reaction would have seemed bizarre… But Apple is not any stock. The market has come to expect extraordinary earnings growth, especially in the Christmas quarter. Traders instead seemed obsessed with Apple’s forward-looking guidance,” Elmer-DeWitt reports.
“Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster confessed that in his five years of covering Apple he’s never seen anything like the market’s reaction to these earnings. ‘I talked to one of our technical analysts before the call and he told me that the stock was going down to 130 no matter what results Apple posted,’ Munster said in a phone interview. ‘Something bigger is going on in people’s minds. There’s a feeling that stocks need to go back to their 200 day averages as the market corrects itself. This is not a bullish sign for other tech stocks going forward,'” Elmer-DeWitt reports.
Full article here.