“The market’s recent rally has done nothing to improve most retail investors’ confidence in the market, a new study shows. And experts say the downward spiral of Apple, perhaps the most widely owned stock among small investors, seems to confirm the queasiness many share about betting on equities,” Quentin Fottrell reports for MarketWatch.
“More than three in four Americans — 76% — say the recent record-breaking run has made them no more inclined to invest in stock, according to research released by Bankrate.com Monday,” Fottrell writes. “Not even record-low interest rates, which have rendered other savings vehicles losing propositions, seem to be able to change that attitude. ‘Although the Fed is trying to push investors into riskier assets in pursuit of better returns, individual investors aren’t biting,’ said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, a personal-finance research and publishing company.”
Fottrell writes, “While the 44% plunge of Apple’s stock since its peak last September may have less to do with the economy than the particular challenges the company faces, experts say the stock carries a great deal of symbolic weight with individual investors… The company’s fans, many of whom believe Apple could do no wrong, are shell shocked, adds Maxwell Wolff, senior analyst at Greencrest Capital Management in New York, and that disappointment has spread. ‘The average retail investor saw Apple as a cash machine,’ he says.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “The particular challenges the company faces.”
Nearly all of it baseless fomenting and FUD out of shorts, hedge funds, and rivals from whom Apple takes the lion’s share of the profits in the smartphone, tablet, personal computing, app store, and music markets.
Gee, here’s a thought: Perhaps it was Wall Street’s ginned-up bullshit combined with the SEC’s somnambulance that drove off mom and pop long before the latest manipulation of Apple’s stock?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
That’s what it means to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Go ahead, Cut your nose to spite your greedy face Wall St, you are one ugly mother’!
+1
There is no problem with Apple, the biggest problem with Wall Street is Wall Street. The more people see the light the sooner Wall Street will be cut down to size and their influence diminished. That my friends, will be a very good thing!
“Apple, perhaps the most widely owned stock among small investors”
Is that true? If so I’m amazed. I’m always been told that the stock was too expensive for small investors.
It is too expensive for small investors if you have less than $400 dollars to invest. Otherwise you CAN invest in Apple.
If all the moms & pops pull out of AAPL then the hedges and shorts have no one to screw. I’m long AAPL since 2005 (so ill still make money) and have never intended to sell, until now. I’ll see which way the wind blows today and tomorrow morning. I will buy a 5S on day 1.
That’s exactly why I sold my meager shares at $400. I got sick of Wall Street and it’s band of idiot analwipe-ists bottom feeding writers jerking me around. I can’t afford it. I’ll buy back in (even if it’s at less shares) once these idiots stop their game. We small investors don’t have a big cushion for these Wall Street bullies to jump on and deflate just to amuse themselves.
Those idiots as you describe them will never stop their game. My two bits is to never ever invest money that you will need in the stock market. My investments are “fun money”. I asked myself “could I still live if I lost every cent of this?” The answer was yes when I made my first investments.
After that I forgot about it, the longer the better. At $400 I am still making a massive profit over my original investment. Short term is fine for some people but over the long run Apple has performed admirably and the drop from $700 to $400 is irrelevant if you think what the stock will be worth say 10 years from now. If it drops to $100, I’ll still be making a profit, it is goes up to $1000 or more, well then I’ll be really laughing on the way to the back.
Meanwhile, I live as best I can with what I have and make other investments as long as I feel I can afford to lose it.
Cause the stock market nutcases and analyst will never ever stop their game, or trying to play it.
That’s the same rule I use in Las Vegas. I quit donating my money there a long time ago. Wall Street isn’t supposed to be a casino, but it sure isn’t anywhere to take your money.
I agree, and I didn’t invest money I needed back in the 1990’s when most of my investment occurred. I invested in Apple when I first learned Steve came back to the company. I think I invested at about $13.00 a share and everyone thought I was crazy to invest at al—even at that amount, and again awhile later around $100. I’ve made money for sure and am thankful. My problem today is, I just can’t afford, at THIS time in my life to lose what profit I have made from it. Things are tough in this economy. So If I reinvest, I may not reinvest the entire sum. Only what I care to risk.
I’m going to stick around and see what happens. But, going forward, I will not be reluctant to sell.
So you played right into their hands. They borrowed your stock from the stock broker, sold it as if it is their own, then bought it back from you at $400 to repay the broker.
Yes, you are right and he did play into their hands. The best way to fight Wall Street is by holding and never buying nor selling. Freezing the market unless you MUST sell. This has a very BIG effect. First, Wall Street gets no more commissions on trades. It also dramatically slows the rate of change in the market. If their are no trades, the prices can neither go up nor down, and it makes it nearly impossible for Analysts to manipulate the market.
If everyone were to buy and hold, then there is no profit in writing a stupid article about a company (either positive or negative) to spin the market. They can try, but they won’t get to far.
Then gradually, people should place a personal value on the stock based on the dividends that they pay, not on the speculative value.
If you want a stable place to put your money outside of the bank, then it should pay more in dividend and have a fairly stable value over the long term.
If that is not what you want, and you are only interested in the speculative price of the stock, then you are gambling and get what you deserve.
If you want to beat Wall Street, and kill their power, do it now. Buy and hold. This goes for all stock, but before you do, ask yourself “how much dividend are they paying, and is this a better deal than my bank?”. If not, keep the cash which keeps the power of your money in your hands not theirs. Don’t forget, it is the fund managers who invest and buy millions of shares of Apple and all of a sudden have the voting power of millions of shares. YOU gave them that power, so rule #2, no funds. If you want a stock, buy it yourself, don’t give the power of your money to a fund manager.
Its not that investors thought Apple could do no wrong its that Apple hasn’t done anything wrong. If you invest in a company that has the best fundamentals of anyone around and can still have the rug pulled out from under you them then there is no stock safe from the Wall Street charlatans. Netflix is up 25% today. Are investors supposed to believe that Netflix will grow into their 500+ multiple?
Yes, we are to believe that Netflix will grow into a 500+ multiple. No one is running around yelling “Netflix is in a bubble.” Not even close. Netflix is on its way to becoming the next Amazon. As with anything about Wall Street, it’s all about rapid growth and market share and right now Netflix is sitting at the top of the heap.
Apple could probably have bought Netflix dirt cheap a while back, but no, they let it just slip through their hands and now Netflix’s share price is more than half of Apple’s because some brilliant accountant at Apple believes it’s better to hold on to their mountain of cash just to see how large it will grow inside some bank vault. Apple could have easily built their own Netflix-style streaming service using all those iTunes credit card accounts, but Apple is so focused on hardware that I guess it never crossed their minds.
Hey I got some swamp land in Florida I think you would no don’t instantly pounce on too. “Don’t be so gullible McFly!”
“no doubt” that is. Need an edit button here!
Don’t even go there. If Apple had purchased Netflix their stock would have been hammered down for a stupid purchase (Wouldn’t matter if that claim had merit or not)
Apple will not introduce their own service until they can get and provide content for their customers/ end users at a reasonable price. They are already prepared with server farms, and will bring more of them online to meet demand, but not until the content comes at a fair price. Server farms are a fact, content negotiations are happening. All I did was connect the known dots. Not rocket surgery or brain science, but the WS morons can’t see it.
It seems lately like the pundicks and analcysts will always find some negative spin to throw APPL down. Fortunately, Apple still has their massive cash pile to sustain their operations past the shortsighted lunacy of WS.
Your comments are so often self-sabotaging, Laughing_Boy48. In this case, paragraph 1 was fine; paragraph 2 not so much…
It’s certainly souring people’s opinion of what there jobs are supposed to be. I thought there jobs were to look at a companies performance and raise or lower the value on that. Apparently things have changed and now they want to run companies like Apple. Tell them how much of there savings should be dividend to them. Tell them when they should release a new product and so on. They have lost all credibility with most of the normal working folks.
The day I doubt Apple’s viability is the day they start listening to these short-sighted (and short-selling) wall street analysts. If it’s true that now many people won’t invest in the market, they have only themselves to blame. Hoist on their own petard.
The problem is they have so completely screwed up the pricing that we no longer have a way to determine if a given price makes any sense as an investment, or is it just a local stop on the manipulation express. So I have to sit out Apple, even though I have great faith in the company.