January 14, 2008: The day the market lost faith in Apple | Hacker News Reader

January 14, 2008: The day the market lost faith in Apple

asymco.com

28 pointsmbateman7 comments

Also potentially relevant, from the article's comments.

Eric D. : "Steve Jobs looked thinner during that presentation than we'd seen him before. And over the next few months, he lost more weight. The market, rightly or wrongly, believes Apple's fortunes are tied to Jobs.

You mean Android hegemony, right?"

>" I’m hoping someone can explain this because to me it makes no sense."

It might be because 2008 was a letdown to the press compared with 2006 (Intel) and 2007 (iPhone). The press was looking for a major new products and significant improvements to existing product lines - see: http://gizmodo.com/343246/what-to-expect-at-macworld-2008-an...

Sure the Air generated some buzz, but importantly the Gizmodos of the world were predicting it would be "Bigger than Usual" The big news came later in the year with the Appstore and Apple was moving towards announcing new products in the summer rather than at the new year (this New Year's announcement wasn't even made by Apple but by Verizon).

Too bad the press didn't get the memo that the iphone SDK would, in time, provide plenty of news.

If development tool releases were newsworthy, the Techcrunch would be so busy writing about Microsoft you would rarely see anything about Apple.

It's typical for the stock of high-growth companies to be harder hit in a recession (a higher beta).

This doesn't explain the time of onset of the trough, but contributes to its depth and breadth. They are likely several factors.

I'm more curious about the cause of the steep walled canyon of P/E lousiness from mid-October of '08 that lasted almost exactly a year.

The article discusses this: it was the earnings collapse of the rest of the S&P500 during the deep recession. This collapse didn't hurt Apple proportionately, but since their stock dropped off quite a bit despite that, their P/E was way down relative to the rest of the S&P500. (3x cash on hand at one point, the author says, which is pretty crazy)

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