Friends Kingdom: Re: [iPad] Apple Stock

Apple's stock has risen based on confidence in their long term and short term leadership and public perception. Long term predictions are based on all these things and short term good news raises stocks and short term bad news lower stocks. The death of Steve Jobs is a basis to consider that Apple may not continue to invent products that produce high profits, new versions of existing that produce even higher profits, and will continue to beat challengers (Surface, Android, Roku, etc.) and that expenses they take on the giant new headquarters they built for example will be possible to feed it's expenses from revenues. The perception at the moment is that without Jobs Apple has yet to produce anything as high revenue/profit as past inventions under him and generate as much good press to raise the stock price.

It is not about profit, or a company like Amazon who has lost money for decades for their investors would not have a high stock value. It is not about revenues or Microsoft who has had high revenues and cash would be a highly valued stock it is not. It is about whether an investor thinks a company will continue to succeed over the next few years. Success being defined as dominating several market segments and defeating all challengers. It is very much about the risk that a company may start to slide down and never rise again (think Yahoo, Blackberry, Novell, Circuit City, CompUSA, etc.)

If you are upset that the stock market does not value a company based on revenues and profits - - I realized that long ago and do not certainly trust the valuations of a company as an indicator of that. The stock market is valued on whether people trust the stock will rise based on all those factors, and that their money is "safe" from big stock price falls. Those things are influenced by all the books I mentioned. People with lots of money in stocks like Yahoo, Blackberry, Novell, Circuit City, CompUSA certainly would have benefited from reading the books I mentioned and knew when to get out.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 9:44 PM, Alice Saunders lwr32@mac.com [iPad] <iPad@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I'm not asking about the rise and fall of companies nor how to predict anything. I want to know why, if Apple makes a lot of money, their stock goes down. In te past Apple has made a lot of money and their stock rose. Their still making a lot of money and at last earnings call, despite all the money they made, their stock dropped.

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( ) Alice
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On Jan 15, 2016, at 8:39 AM, Myrddin Wyllt myrddinwyllt1964@gmail.com [iPad] <iPad@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Revenue and profit sadly are not the main indicator since that can change dramatically in a few months or years. When a company has revenues and profits and invests it in staff, buildings and R&D that will be hard to sustain if revenues and profits suddenly dip. Don't think it changes dramatically -- look at PC Makers, software like Dbase, Lotus, WordPerfect, hardware/os/software like Blackberry and realize they were considered extremely profitable and valuable but smart people sold their stock and invested in their replacements as the signs were there that they had competitors that would remove their dominance.

Short term revenue and profit may be a "last hurrah" and 1-3 years later the company may be struggling.

I recommend reading books on marketing and business management like "Marketing Warfare" by Trout and Reiss, "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell, "Selling The Wheel" and "Crossing The Chasm" to get much more insight in how and why companies will be highly profitable and a few years later struggling and how the companies arise that take business away from very successful ones. Newspapers and magazines by their nature are stories of "Man Bites Dog" so they really don't cover the essentials of what makes a business and marketing strategy and product development suceed or fail over decades or a century.

The books I mention here have helped me predict the rise and fall of several companies with high accuracy. Before reading those books I was often way off at determining what businesses would succeed, and what businesses would seemingly out of the blue fail.

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 9:17 AM, Pat Taylor pat412@mac.com [iPad] <iPad@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

There are countless articles on the topic in both the tech and business press, but none of them have made much sense to me!

Pat

On Jan 15, 2016, at 1:39 AM, Alice Saunders lwr32@mac.com [iPad] <iPad@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Ok, if any of you are like me, you don't understand the stock market. I know I don't. I always thought that if a company does well and makes money, their stock goes up. Apparently that isn't so. I listen to the podcasts, DTNS (Daily Tech News Show), BTNS (British Tech News Show), Mac OS Ken and iMore the most. DRNS, BTNS and Mac OS Ken are daily. iMore is about once a week for Mac news. All were reporting Apple made a ton of money (as always) but that their stock went down. How does that work? Shouldn't Apple stock go up if they make a ton of money?

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( ) Alice
.( ). lwr32@mac.com