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Comment by MaysonL | Hacker News Reader

61% year-over-year revenue growth: simply astounding.

I find it more astounding how no one can do the same.

Is everyone else really that bad? Or is Apple just that good?

Noone else has a guy at the helm of the ship that's a worldclass salesman, a true visionary, an amazing product guy and a detail obsessed perfectionist all rolled into one.

For a company that size, 60% growth is amazing.

It isn't just the ratio of growth, it is also the scale. 60% growth in a multibillion dollar company is much harder than going from 100k to 160k in revenue.

And for that the stock is up 3% after hours.

I can't tell if you're being snarky or not. Keep in mind that expectations of future earnings are already priced into the stock, so the 3% gain you're seeing is for the earnings ABOVE expectations/estimates.

Other factors, including uncertainty over antennagate, will also keep the stock from making a huge jump.

It's more that Apple's stock behaves in completely irrational ways; typically, news which would cause any other company's stock to skyrocket instead causes Apple's to plummet. In the past, "analysts" such as Jim Cramer have admitted to deliberately manipulating the market to produce this effect, which may provide some explanation, but there seems to be a consistent trend of underestimating/undervaluing Apple regardless of how many consecutive quarters of stellar performance they crank out.

Really? You think you know when the market is being irrational? Can I ask how much money you've made trading your knowledge so far? I assume you're invested in Apple, since you know that the market consistently underestimates them.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune (if you'd like some reading on the subject) does a rather amusing quarterly piece in which he compares analyst predictions of Apple's performance with observed reality. If it happened once or twice, that would be understandable; such predictions are complex and difficult to make. But the track record is so consistently and so universally bad that I find it difficult to believe there's a truly rational process behind it; sooner or later, folks should be noticing the disparity between prediction and reality and trying to fix their process.

Apple's stock price seems to behave similarly; if any company not named "Apple, Inc." announces a new product which receives good reviews, generates high pre-sale demand and looks to have a high profit margin, that company's stock price quite predictably rises. But if the company happens to be named "Apple, Inc." the stock price almost invariably drops (go look at charts for AAPL on and around the days of major product announcements and launches). Perhaps you're aware of some deep principle which explains why this is rational behavior on the part of investors and traders, but I certainly am not.

Um, if a person claims that the market itself is behaving irrationally then how why would you expect that they could prove it by making money on said market?

You know what's interesting about the stock market? If everyone else is wrong and you're right: you lose.

It's not irrational. The traders essentially control the stock market and call the shots by manipulating the market into a favorable position then sell the stock. A glut of shares appearing on the market would thus drive the price down. The term is called "profit taking".

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/profittaking.asp

According to your conspiracy theory, the price is sometimes artificially low and sometimes artificially high. Why haven't you made a profit by short selling? Why wouldn't a competing company?

Which means that the smart people already figured it out and it was mostly priced into the stock already.

Remember, the stock price is at least as smart as the smartest investors trading it.

In all seriousness, and meaning this not at all as an insult, I recommend never investing in anything stock-market-related except index funds until it stops seeming intuitive to you that the stock ought to jump on the same day that news like this is publicly summarized and announced.

You have a pretty different view on the stock market than I do. The only "smart" people I see involved in the whole thing, as far as I can tell, are the ones writing algorithms that try to guess what the crowd is going to do (usually by looking at what they've previously done).

(disclaimer: I work in the financial industry)

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