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Selling Apple Stock

nerdr.com

7 pointsmrvc7 comments

Simple fact: Apple make the best and most profitable products in their categories. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and Macbook Air.

This strategy was probably chosen by Steve Jobs. The 'best' part comes from the design team, under Jonathan Ive. The 'most profitable' part comes from operations and sourcing, under Tim Cook.

They've nailed the mobile sector. They're starting to nail the computer market. People I know who have sworn by PCs for years are moving to Macs - why? They are the best designed laptops available, bar none. I'm holding Apple stock because they are the strongest company in a strong sector. Apple are going to take the profitable laptop market, the profitable music and video markets, and hang on to the profitable portable electronics markets. That's a massive market cap for them to usurp from Dell, Amazon, and Nokia/Samsung. Everyone else will be churning out cheap and cheerful low margin products.

Wow, talk about completed misguided. He's making the mistake of conflating a company as stagnating based solely on the fact that the stock is still trading in the same ranges as it was 6 months ago.

First off, I don't see how you can call a company stagnant that reported a record profit in Q2 with 95% growth year over year, including a 113% unit growth in it's primary product.

Secondly, he ignores a number of factors that have influenced Apple's stock price independently of company fundamentals like the rebalancing of the Nasdaq and the current weekly option plays that are collaring Apple.

Not to mention he ignores everything that has been hammering stocks in general, given economic and political uncertainty in much of the world.

So outside of actual financials, other things also struck me wrong in his post. If iPads are for geeks only, then there must be a hell of a lot of geeks in corporate America, because I am seeing these things adopted everywhere for all sorts of uses. Also, his supposition that "Software doesn’t move product" is probably the most ridiculous. Apple's whole proposition from the original Mac onwards was the software. It was the software that made the original Mac popular. It made MacBooks popular. It made the iPhone and iPod popular.

I thought he was making sense up until he said only geeks care about the iPad. This isn't true. A future where only geeks care about laptops almost seems the more likely at this point. You could certainly say that about desktops already.

Also I'm not sure about the stock being stagnant point. What did the rest of the market do?

Looking at the Yahoo chart linked in the article http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL+Basic+Chart&t=2y it looks like stagnation from about January 2011 onwards. That really nailed it for me.

From that chart you could have said the same thing in Sep '10, Feb '10, or anytime between Oct '07 and Mar '09, and each time you'd be wrong.

You are absolutely correct. See for an illustration of this: http://seekingalpha.com/article/271991-apple-price-stall-is-...

  You could certainly say that about desktops already.

You could, but you'd be pretty wrong. My mum has a PC, my dad has a PC, my computer illiterate sister has a PC, my brother has a PC, my 9 year old nephew has a PC, my (non-geek) friends have PCs, my colleagues have PCs. And, since personal expamples aren't proof, just look at the size of the market, it's far from being a niche.

Argue the case that desktops will become obsolete, but that certainly hasn't happened yet.

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