“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.]