Recent Comments

  • David Drinkwater on Tim Cook stuck to his knitting - 'That’s the answer to the $25 million question that I posed on Saturday. (Hence upvoted.)'
  • Ron Fredrick on Premarket: Apple is green - 'At market close last Friday, 07/31/26, AAPL was down about -7.4% from the previous day and about -9.2% from its ATH close on 07/28/26. Since my wife and I have been 100% invested in AAPL for the past 26 years we watched our entire portfolio drop that same percentage over those two days. I’ve often compared our current AAPL portfolio worth to our AAPL portfolio worth when I retired in 2008. At AAPL’s recent ATH close, our portfolio was about 55.8 times the 2008 size…now it’s about 50.7. Is there a problem with long-term investing in AAPL? I don’t think so. And, since we held AAPL when it dropped -35% in 2002, -57% in 2008 and through 3 other years when AAPL was negative for the year, I’m not worried. After all, AAPL is still up 13.6% for 2026…and if we look at the entire “Magnificent Seven” stocks, AAPL is still doing very well in comparison. YTD Percentages (as of 0/31/26) 1. AMZN: +17.7% YTD 2. GOOG: +13.7% YTD 3. AAPL: +13.6% YTD 4. NVDA: +7.6% YTD 5. MSFT: +3.9% YTD 6. META: -15.7% YTD 7. TSLA: -30.8% YTD Cheers to the very patient AAPL Longs!'
  • Steven Philips on Premarket: Apple is green - 'For some reason AAPL dropped on opening. Now around 305. 🙁'
  • Steven Philips on Apple-AI enthusiast Errol Brandt looks forward to Oracle's comeuppance - 'Well that “sums up” ( 🙂 ! ) things rather nicely! 🙂'
  • Fred Stein on Apple-AI enthusiast Errol Brandt looks forward to Oracle's comeuppance - 'Side note: Hope Gregg is OK, given the fires up there.'
  • Greg Lippert on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Darn, I coined “House of Cards” yesterday in trading strategies thread but it somehow got autocorrected to “hours of cards”.'
  • Steven Philips on Tim Cook stuck to his knitting - 'Yup! In normal circumstances one could send apologies for having “other commitments” but Trump is so overly sensitive to perceived slights and so overly retaliatory that fiduciary responsibility makes attendance mandatory.'
  • Ron Fredrick on Apple-AI enthusiast Errol Brandt looks forward to Oracle's comeuppance - 'Philip Elmer-DeWitt said: “Found in Kiraa’s comments: Q: What’s the difference between Larry Ellison and God? A: God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.” **Perfect!! 🙂'
  • David Thall on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Sorry, there are some really bad typos in my comment because before I fixed them the time limit ran out. That’s what happens when you try to use Siri to write something. I was referring to Kevin Spacey’s sexual predilections.'
  • David Thall on Premarket: Apple is green - '“It still feels like a house of cards”. That’s a good metaphor. I think it feels like a house of cards for two reasons. One, you’re a human being and have “feelings”. AI does not have feelings. And the other, is if you remember the hit Netflix series years ago starring Kevin Spacey – “House of Cards” – the show in his career all came tumbling down when the awful truth came out about his predict sexual predictions. A real tragedy seeing so much talent go to waste. To a degree, I think that’s going to happen with the big AI spending craze. The amount of CapEx being spent on creating AI infrastructure, versus the amount of profits being made off AI just don’t make a lot of sense at the moment. It seems every other month, news comes out that it’s not really necessary to create it that way. Not to mention the only reason everyone’s in a big hurry is because of the silicon, billionaire’s propaganda machine that is committed to sucking up all the resources and money out there. I think maybe a more accurate metaphor du jour may ultimately be Frankenstein. A monster built out of all dead parts, that was big and powerful and scary, and spawn a lot of sequels. But ultimately was a exciting story that spawned a lot of other great stories. I’m looking forward to the other stories. In Apple‘s case, it may very well be a story about their upcoming new M7 chip that allows everyone to do their AI locally and privately and vastly more affordably on Mac studio. There is no deadline.'
  • Bill Donahue on Tim Cook stuck to his knitting - 'Re your question, PED, simple answer: As absolutely unsavoury as it is, yes. Had he not, Apple would have faced exceptional punishment from the self-interested, vindictive, retributive, transactional person inhabiting that building.'
  • Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Apple-AI enthusiast Errol Brandt looks forward to Oracle's comeuppance - 'Found in Kiraa’s comments: Q: What’s the difference between Larry Ellison and God? A: God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.'
  • Steven Philips on Premarket: Apple is green - 'I just can’t get my head around the idea that AI data centers are paying off. Something about that just seems wrong. It still feels like a house of cards.'
  • Horace Dediu on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - 'A dollar a day, always and forever. Multiply by addressable market (billions of devices), attach services, apply net margin, tax rate, share buyback rate and price to earnings multiple and you get the firm’s market cap. I call it the ACTIVE model.'
  • David Thall on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Like a lot of Apple alumni, I was numb by the end of the close on Friday. Well, after listening to Apple’s conference call, the talking heads, and analyst’s opinions, my initial foreboding – that the sky was falling again – passed. MY TAKE We’ve been here before. A big “sell on the news” is not new. What’s unusual, is the speed and degree of the sell-off. Statistically, as we all know now, it’s Apple’s biggest one day sell-off in 13 years. Why? Two reasons: 1.) AI. According to the post-conference call narration – it’s all about the shortage of memory chips. Uh, excuse me, but am I the only one that noticed this before? That the impact the shortage of memory is going to have on Apple has already been reported for weeks by absolutely everyone… to DEATH? In fact, prior to the ER, as we all know, Apple had already announced raising their prices of certain devices. And as every Apple investor who is paying attention knows, the price of iPhones will almost certainly be going up too. The proverbial other shoe to drop. And yet, as we also know, the stock price continued to magically go up anyway, as analysts raised their price targets. The point is, the supply side issues are not news. The market, the analysts, and talking heads from here to Pluto, already digested it. 2.) But… then Tim Cook in the conference call, confirmed what everyone already knew – and apparently triggered AI algorithms and their HFT‘s to execute their playbook and “sell on the news.” Preprogrammed algorithms designed to trigger other preprogrammed algorithms. Blah, blah, blah. Admittedly, HFT’s are something that’ve been around for decades. However, what’s changed now is the widespread deployment of AI – to every gambling addict and trader on the planet. From the new online ‘bet on everything’ mini-casinos, that let government employees bet on when a country is going to drop a bomb on another country – to the Wall Street professionals, or anyone with a PC, betting on whether there’ll be a “sell on the news” after Apple‘s ER. Another wonderful benefit of AI. Oh, the irony. IS AI A SCAM? The one reason, and I believe only reason, there is this ginormous rush to build out AI infrastructure like bats out of hell – is because a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley very aggressively financed a hyperbolic propaganda machine to make AI the number one priority for American business. Paying politicians to declare – we’re in a race for our very lives and must build out AI before the Chinese do. It’s a helluva playbook. But why are these tech moguls really racing to package AI like it’s the next Manhattan Project? As the cliché goes, follow the money. They want to suck up as much funding as possible, as fast as possible, and avoid any government regulations whatsoever. And do it before anybody notices that the absurdly super-sized data server farms – that are sucking up all of our water and electricity, and are destroying the communities that they’re being built next to. Remember Erin Brockovich? She has been deep dive investigating these super-sized server plants, and discovered that every single one of them have non-disclosure agreements. In other words, public scrutiny and control is being blocked. Big tech companies are in a mad rush to build their oversized facilities in everyone’s backyard for the exact same reason that Mark Zuckerberg sold over 80 million personal profiles of users to Cambridge Analytica – before anybody noticed. Because they could. Unlike every other major corporation in America, they don’t want to have to get approval from the public. But I digress. AI sucking up all the energy, water, and memory chips is the price we are paying so Silicon billionaires can become trillionaires. Nobody asked for this. Apple is going to rise above this speciously created emergency. How? Because among other things, Apple is the only high-tech company that gives a damn about consumer privacy. AI companies couldn’t care less. Because that’s their business model. Apple on the other hand, will be richly rewarded for giving a damn. Bottom line: Analysts have not lowered their targets for good reason. Long-term, Apple stock will do just fine. There is no finish line. Happy trading.'
  • Bill Donahue on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - 'I’ve always taken your approach, Greg, when it comes to the cost of Apple Care and the likelihood that I’ll need it. Only once in more than 30 years of using Apple products has anything suddenly crapped out while I was using it, and that was an iMac Graphite in the late 90s after it was probably 4-5 years old. I managed to reanimate it long enough to scrape almost everything off it, and had almost everything backed up, so it was more an inconvenience than a catastrophe.'
  • Bill Donahue on The AI burn rate is making Washington nervous - 'Joe – and Mark: Those hypothetical projections of huge increases in free cash flow and profits after 2-3 years of operating all the datacenters being built also ignores that all the LLM-pushing hyperscalers have been dropping their fees to use their latest LLMs by huge amounts. Because, as it turns out, the market for subscription- or fee-based use of LLMs isn’t very big and there is a lot of competition between not only the hyperscalers but also companies popping out LLMs that are almost as good functionally but cost small fractions to develop and operate. Even this last week in financial reporting the revenue increases were less than the cap-ex spending. That is not a recipe for a 2-3 year payment of building costs.'
  • Bill Donahue on The AI burn rate is making Washington nervous - 'It’s not only that the “top” AI bots provide quick answers. They also provide wrong answers that most people don’t even know are wrong.'
  • John Lizza on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Thanks Robert. Good insight and context.'
  • Joseph Bland on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Apple has been underestimated multiple times a year for as long as I’ve followed their stock. As I said earlier: “These are not the droids we’re looking for: Move along…”'
  • Joseph Bland on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Morning, Gregg. My stepson gives them 10 years until those buildings will be, like abandoned mansions, malls, etc, the subject of “doom porn” videos….'
  • Joseph Bland on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Hi, Greg. There already are “shenanigans”, and when the Dems get in power, the facts will come out – and they won’t be pretty. Why else do you think this President, Administration, Congress and rigged Supreme Court are in a panic, to the point of attempting to destroy our democratic republic? As a very famous individual once said: “I has seen the enemy, and he is us.”'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria is a smart and informed analyst. Despite Apple’s headline grabbing, rubberneck-inducing pullback on Friday, the shares have performed comparatively very well over the past 12 months: 1-Year Share Price Performance Alphabet – up 84.93% Apple – up 48.82% NASDAQ Composite – up 20.13% DJIA — up 18.93% S&P 500 – up 18.15% Amazon – up 16.01% Microsoft – down (12.89%) Meta – down (28.02%) Oracle – down (48.82% Apple has outperformed almost all of the big hyperscalers and all of the major indexes over the past year. This is not to take away from the impressive results delivered this week by Amazon and Microsoft. As Mr. Luria suggests, Apple was likely a refuge or haven for those wary of the hyperscalers and their pending results. With Microsoft and Amazon reporting, it’s safe for investors to get off the beach so-to-speak and get back in the water. I’m bullish on Apple, a few other select names in tech and, in general, on the AI trade. There will, however, likely both winners and losers in the trade.'
  • Steven Philips on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - 'Not an area of knowledge for me, but your comment about business and leasing felt important to me. Especially considering it applies to ALL Apple’s products.'
  • Gregg Thurman on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Data Center supporters better hurry, Apple’s on device tune is picking up listensers. By the time you are ready for prime time it may be too late. Being generous I give them until 2031, then too much of the market they are counting on will have taken a different path.'
  • Greg Lippert on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'As long as the data centers sell all their capacity its a win for them, but if demand falters the hours of cards come tumbling down.'
  • Greg Lippert on This week's Apple trading strategies (8/3-8/7/26) - 'Let’s hope they leave when voted out and not play shenanigans.'
  • Gregg Thurman on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - '” my initial impression is that Apple Upgrade could help power the company’s next trillion…” A happy thought to be sure, but leasing can’t increase sales if the product behind the lease isn’t there. iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, Mac “Baltra”, MacBooks, (“AI” feature/content creation) to iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Apple Video, (“AI” feature/content consumption) are going to drive revenue. Leasing will just make the acquisition easier. Is Gurman turning the page on his reporting style? Of late, in interviews, he is coming off as a more knowledgeable ‘statesman’ vs a rumor monger, and making good points. There remain many better than he, but the improvements are refreshing.'
  • Joseph Bland on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - 'Check out my comment lower down, Fred. I suppose that Apple refurbishing assembly line I worked on (at better than average temp wages, btw) could be replaced by a robotic system, but we were pretty good, and the job at each workstation shifted week to week, which helped stave off boredom. My only kick with it was (1) being at the mercy of Apple-direct bosses who could be tyrannical (not mine, thankfully!) and (2) being generally treated like 2nd class Apple employees.'
  • Joseph Bland on Mark Gurman: Apple is now a subscription - 'Morning, Steven. Been on the 1 year program since it started, partly because I got an early invite to buy a new one – sort of like saving a place in line… And I’d have bought a new one every year anyway, and it saved me the hassle of selling it on. Also, I knew some lucky person would get my basically pristine used iPhone (I always bought a cover and a screen shield), so I figured it would go to a good home…'