Apple closes trading with $700B+ market cap
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
(Sorry, but can't resist adding: Given that it's worth 30% more than Apple, I guess that's why they call NYC the Big Apple...)
Shouldn't that be "..largest PUBLIC company by market cap..."? Isn't Saudi Aramco's value in trillions for example?
Incorrect. They aren't traded on an exchange, but they are certainly traded in a market. A market is any situation where people buy and sell to one another. Venture capitalists certainly buy shares in private companies. Similarly, a private car dealership, private family restaurant, etc can (and often are) sold from the original owner to a new owner. Thus, a market exists.
I think the term you are looking for is exchange. The distinction between a market and an exchange is an exchange creates more explicit rules on trading in order to make the goods traded commoditized.
For example, instead of buying corn at my farmers market where the differences in corn might matter for both price and quality (local, organic, some farmer just happens to grow more delicious corn), when you buy agricultural commodities from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), each contract is equivalent. X many bushes of corn at Y price. By making rules on quality and standardizing the goods/contracts/etc, an exchange helps to bring about price discovery and ensure the goods are priced correctly.
But it isn't inherent that exchanges cause the true price to be found or that OTC[0] markets are inferior or less accurate. It depends on numerous factors for whether a share price is being valued correctly.
Along these lines, I heard there were complaints in the UK's LIFFE market because excess rainfall was damaging French wheat crops, but even the poor crops were within the exchange's loose contract specifications.
But I suppose this is a bit of a tangent. The takeaway is that everything is traded on a market somewhere, but there are different sizes and standards for markets. Private companies can have some number of institutional investors while still keeping reporting requirements low (IIRC Facebook ran into this limit before their IPO). Ergo, every company has a market cap, but companies with fewer investors/owners are harder to measure.
Considering the drop in oil prices lately, it's quite possible Apple's revenue exceeded Aramco's last quarter
http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxon-mobil-corpora...
Most of those 30 trillion assets are deep into the ground, and cannot be turned into profits for free. If you need to spend (say) 2 dollars for every 3 dollars of worth of oil you extract, then the value of the company is already <$10T. The operating expenses can be pretty high. There's also taxes and interest.
Also, we don't know what the price of oil will be in 5 or 10 years, so we have to price in that uncertainty too.
I don't see why valuation isn't just as good at market cap, if a bit less liquid. same idea.
We can all argue whether Airbnb is worth $2B or $6B and Uber $40+ Billion, but these valuations aren't made up. They follow accounting rules.
One primary example is mark to market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-to-market_accounting
Now let's watch the words "worth" and "value" be thrown around recklessly. :)
With zero liquidity. http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GRLD/quote indicates trading volume of 800 shares and their shares were $0.10 until January 28th, upon which someone started trading a few hundred shares a day at about $6.
That's not a bubble, that's someone screwing with a tiny stock. Probably selling back and forth to themself.
You and a friend start a couple "businesses".
You each sell 50% of your "stock" to each other for $xmillion. Since it's a stock swap, no money has to change hands but now both of your companies are valued at 2 x $xmillion and voila you're an instant paper millionaire.
You can play a similar game with paintings and both become instant hot vogue modern artists. Imagine your next piece going up for sale at auction "his last piece sold for $30 million". I've actually known a few artists doing something like this at low $ amounts (a $3000-$15000) in order to stir up interest in their work in local scenes. If you go to a show and see some pieces up, but marked "sold" with a price tag like this, it's usually to create buzz. The best part is they'll both have receipts of sale that legitimize the whole thing.
According to finance theory you're also creating market "value" without there needing to be any new currency circulated.
It's a massive flow of some of the cheapest capital available being pumped regularly into government treasuries and private financial institutions, with central banks (for whom losses are meaningless) holding more and more of the bonded debt continuously, every year.
Then, whether or not a government program like the "Working Group On Financial Markets" ('pluge protection team') prevents cascading selloffs in equity positions, or whether it's simply the self-reinforced cycle of buying-2x%-up-on-a-x%-drop asset trading algorithms that have enough cash this month because of the central banks, and don't have to sell down their equity positions because last months positions are neutral-to-good, there's enough breathing room to trade up again this month, and a reliable "Federal Reserve put" backstopping everyone.
This is happening because we live in a new state of financial fantasy ever since everyone went bankrupt in 2008. Now they just keep printing money and sharing it amongst elite government (military) powers and private equity/asset controlling powers.
Few in the private sector would be solvent if they actually had to take losses on their assets back in 2008, in an environment where liquidity could not match obligations, and everyone would have to sell. It's the same for the public balance sheets, who need profits in the private sector to have any money at all, and who usually overspend and oblige themselves to more debt than they can pay down even if good times lasted forever.
Debt is money, and debt is an asset. Who cares if there's always more debt than money?
We're just all continuously bull-shitting-out money from the central banks, to the elite capital/government institutions, down to the middle- and upper-class. And to the U.S. war machine, which has a magic credit card with no limit, but which would have gone bankrupt in anything like a real market.
One reason they have to do this is to keep baby boomers' retirement "assets" worth something, in a situation where they all are going to want to cash out of 50 year's of liquidity-draining investments over a 20 year period, which will be quite a liquidity-draining effect on the equity markets. But that's a whole 'nother long discussion.
The West bullshits itself pretty hardcore over the television, and on the internet, and in their suburbs, and at their corporate workplaces. But it's the bullshit financial markets (and the fantasy-land equity market valuations) that is the both the biggest pile of bullshit of all, and is the power source which keeps the rest of the bullshit from collapsing.
But, hey, go ahead, tell yourself these are "conservatively" priced markets. You're a great citizen.
Valuations are one of the least reliable attributes that use numbers I've ever seen. They're so unreliable as to be effectively worthless in any meaningful conversation. They indicate almost nothing, and aren't calculated in any consistent or meaningful way. If they're based on anything at all it's the most fractional speculation imaginable. Any company can sell me a single share at a price that would put their valuation into the billions. It's literally made up numbers. That's why this kind of stupidity exists http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/05/the_grilled_c...
They make the most popular consumer products in the world, and make a huge amount of profit as a result.
Honestly though, I would love some other choices but they competition in general just sucks. For awhile android phones almost caught my attention but the pc world hasn't since my first 24 inch iMac. Tablet market is just, Apple.
And in my daily life I do not see many ipads. Only amongst those so ignorant to think tablets = Apple in the same way they think computers = Windows. There are plenty of Android tablets out there in use, a lot of them are in businesses now due to the significantly lower cost to adopt $100 - $200 tablets over ipad minis, combined with developer fees and the hoops to jump through with xcode licenses and ios developer licenses and all that bullshit.
In my daily life I see quite a few iPads, but rarely a Nexus, and then only amongst those that have severe psychological issues. Nothing from Google interests me with their insistence on seeing me as a slave to their income generating advertisements./s
Even just among Android phones, their products are neither the most affordable, the most powerful, the most user-friendly, the best supported, or the best constructed but they have managed to become the go-to brand for people buying an Android handset.
Pretty much everyone I've met (yeah, anecdotes) with less of an unhealthy interest in consumer electronics than me defaults to "iPhone or Samsung" when looking at phones. Of the people I interact with most often, about 50% have Apple Phones, 45% have Samsungs, and the remaining 5% have Moto X's or Nexuses or other brands.
So I went and got a 6+. I have to say since it was my first iPhone I was blown away. I was in the camp of "Why do I need to spend $1000 to do what this $200 moto g can do?" I really can't see how android users feel that any android device is as polished as the iphone. I guess its subjective but honestly >90% of people I know in silicon valley have an iphone. If the most tech centered place in the world all use iphones, I think that says something. Its more than just its the trendy cool thing to do. Its honestly a better experience and the professionals can see that. If I, an engineer in silicon valley, can't get android to do what I want when I want it, how can I expect the average user to master it? Maybe its because I have a higher standard for software and user design since I am in the business but everyday I find some subtle way that the iphone manages to impress me, a feeling I never got on android.
I tried an iPhone 6, moving away from a Nexus 5 and then a Moto X. I enjoyed many parts of it--Touch ID is cool, Apple Pay is cool--but I took it back two days later because the operating system expects you to have a thumb the size of Montana to do something as simple as going back a screen in the mail app and I found dealing with applications and getting the phone the way I wanted it (and I'm no iOS newbie, I had an iPhone 4 and have multiple iPads) was at best interminable, at worst impossible. I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It's the first cell phone I've loved since the iPhone 4--unsurprising, as it borrows a lot from its design while being pretty unique and pleasant on its own. (The waterproofing is great, hiding the connectors during regular use is nice, having a real focus-stop camera button is brilliant. Also, it's bright orange. My Nexus 5 was bright red. This is kind of my thing.)
As far as your argumentum ad turtleneckum, I wouldn't give ninety percent of the people I know in Silicon Valley the time of day. Their choice of phone doesn't reflect on me or the world at large.
That wasn't the main reason I took it back, though if they had an iPhone 5-sized upgraded iPhone 6 I'd probably have kept it longer. (I probably wouldn't have kept it, there were enough other frustrations that not paying $900 for a phone and being able to get a better phone for my use case for $375 was appealing, but it might have lasted longer than a snowy weekend.)
Most of my iOS complaints were fixed in 8 and phone size was finally remedied.
Admittedly, if Google had released an update Nexus5+ for $350 I likely would have just stayed with Android for the cost alone.
There are lots of shovelware applications on Android (lots on iOS too, though), but I don't really live on my phone so I think it's just much less of a thing for me.
It's a status signaller. It's like the Macbook Pro. From your reasoning, OSX must be the best OS out there given its popularity in SV, yet the grunt work for the vast majority of SV companies is done by linux - the stuff on the servers, making their money. Horses for courses, there is no One True OS.
It's also a massive overgeneralisation to say that the population of SV are essentially experts in phone design and UX. And if you think that the SV engineer is immune to fashion trends by dint of 'being professional', you'd be wrong. Witness the current fad of flat design, for example.
Then there's people like me, who see the 'better experience' as including things outside the phone. Supporting Apple supports their business model which suffocates open source and prevents tinkering. That's a worse experience for me.
Apple makes the only usable laptop OS these days (now that Windows 7 gave way to iOWondows)
Also, Linus Torvalds uses OS X on his macbook air.
It's almost like OSX isn't the One True OS, and that different people have different preferences.
Edit: I also disagree with the comment that OSX is the only usable laptop OS. Linux does require more maintenance overhead, but it's perfectly usable. At my last workplace there were plenty of people complaining about their OSX laptops, both in terms of various problems, and also that their older machines were slowing to the point of uselessness.
Like I said, horses for courses.
Marketing encourages people to take a look at their products. But if the products are terrible then nobody is going to buy them. Apple has had plenty of failures in the past despite good marketing e.g. Cube, many of the iMac variants.
The reason Apple does well is FOCUS. They keep their products lines simple which makes it easy for consumers to rationalise and easy for them to scale and improve.
if it breaks 12 months in, you put in $108 then $200 for the deductible. Those are conservative estimates because I can't find the pricing right now but I now it is more.
My iphone apple care was $100. If it breaks that is $79. I can break it 3 times over the course of 24 months and it is cheaper than breaking the galaxy once at 12 months. Applecare is a steal.
I used to be impressed with how Apple products 'just work', but recently they have noticeably started slipping in this area.
I hope that happens to laptops too, because I'd love to have alternatives and some more competition.
Could it not be that Apple's success has less to do with marketing and more to do with the lack of quality amongst it's competitors?