First, people are buying equities in general because interest rates are being held low artificially by the Fed, which has been pressured by the President to do this.
Second, few traders and investors understand how to differentiate semiconductor companies, so when it blows, it will all blow. People get out of crowded trades chaotically. Investors and traders, who are largely unsophisticated about the specific technologies that each company develops and markets, will punish the sector rather than choosing individual names to sell. I will say it again: most people who trade tech professionally have no fucking clue what these companies actually build. They look at numbers, watch earnings reports, and listen to buzzword-laden commentary from research analysts.
Look at Apple. Their supply chain is threatened by factory shutdowns and a huge market of theirs has basically been put on ice, but their stock is near all-time highs. They haven't made a game-changing product since the days of Steve Jobs, and people usually say their value now comes from their execution. But how can you execute if your suppliers are shut down and one of your major markets is closed for business?
INTC is facing tons of pressure in enterprise and PC from AMD, their 10nm has been a disaster for them, and yet their stock popped 9% on earnings due to cloud demand. It's trading near dot-com bubble levels. They are getting hurt in their competition vs TSMC on fab, and losing market share to AMD, yet their stock is like a rocket ship. Doesn't this seem weird?
QCOM has been hit hard by several regulators and in a number of lawsuits for its IP bullying, it has come out and said that coronavirus is going to hurt smartphone manufacturing and sales, and yet its stock is trading near all-time highs.
Don't ever confuse stock performance with company performance. Boeing stock is trading at more than double where it was when the 737 Max 8 took its first flight four years ago.
Just because you like the Apple Watch doesn't mean that it has changed the way the company does business. And the fact that Apple doesn't break out gross margin for this category tells us that they aren't particularly proud of that number. Gross margin on products as a whole is about 34%.
Apple wants to paint the picture that they are diversifying away from phones, which accounted for over 3/5 of their revenue this past quarter, and shifting toward services and other products.
But it's one thing to repeat a rosy narrative, and another entirely to back it up with financial statements. Apple is still a phone company, and if the Apple Watch really drove profits for them, they'd break "wearables" out to its own line item, or at least show us the gross margin for "wearable, home, and accessories."
https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2020/q1/... https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2019/ar/...
The Apple Watch by itself is estimated to be larger than the iPod was at its peak. (http://www.asymco.com/2019/12/12/ipods-pro/) and the Airpods if they are not already larger than the iPod at its peak soon will be.
As far as the iPod Touch, the entire iPod line was less than 1.5 million a quarter when they stopped breaking out the numbers (years before they stopped reporting volumes of their other lines).
The iPhone when it was introduced was already introduced into a market with a 1 billion device/year run rate. Now close to 5 billion people own cell phones (https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...).
Also, 61% of their revenue comes from phones. (https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2020/financials-2020-1-...)
And of course the iPhone is going to sell well during the Christmas quarter and after they introduce new phones compared to most quarters.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...
But the last time I checked, even a category that is only 10% of Apple's revenue still puts that category's revenue above all but the top 100 companies in the US.
I can't agree with you on the Apple perspective, and it's my subjective opinion, I might be also biased since I have a large position on APPL. However, I can agree on the idea that the stock price can be completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the company.
Seems like half of NYC has airpods when I’m walking around and in most of the stores here they won’t be in stock until March (a jump from mid February a couple of weeks ago).
That could be supply chain disruption or they’re selling like hot cakes.
Very satisfied with my pro pod pair post purchase as well.
I have no idea if INTC is a good stock to buy, but it sounds like you have an idea of who they are that is based on a lot of ordinary people and their stereotypes about the company from the media and from using computers for years.
A company can be reshaped much faster internally than their public image, but I don't think you have to be an insider, a genius, or a professional to figure it out. You just have to read their reports to the SEC. Not for the decimal places, but for one or two significant figures and the text.
What I'm saying is, I don't know if x86 CPUs have the significance you think or not. If people did buy the stock based on "cloud demand", then I would say "huh, I wonder if that's justified, what proportion of their business is it and how is it growing?" Rather than assuming they are who I think they are. IBM, GE, many other companies have strong images of the companies they used to be with the public, so I imagine many people own stock without any idea of what they really have.