Yesterday, Apple announced earnings…EVERYONE cared.
After Yahoo announced a tripling of earnings (i imagine all from cost cutting), you CAN’T find one story on TechMeme about them. Apple is still the whole front page. Actually, there is one story on TechMeme…the head of Yahoo Apps ( freaky Bill Gates lookalike) resigned . Oy.
Yahoo is getting lighter for sure. They have gone from an obese 500 pound, ugly American, to a 320 pounder. Still fat, hard to look at and mostly tired, but a flickr (get it) of light and hope.
In my world, if you mention Yahoo, you think of one thing…Yahoo Finance. For all Yahoo’s flaws, Yahoo finance still rocks in it’s aggregation of data. It does everything I need except a normal conversation (go read the comments to Tech Ticker and the message boards) and a completely live, honest and raw video 24 hour finance network. They could fix that pretty quickly .
Yes, they should have taken the Microsoft offer, but it’s kind of cool they told Ballmer to stick it. I probably would not have and you know what I think of Ballmer .
With a market capitalization on $24 billion and sales of $6 billion it is hard for me to get excited about the stock or company on any kind of valuation or momentum formula. That said, kudos to 12-13 year old company that could be this big, hated, loved and ignored this much.
Nobody owned it until it hit $170 on the way to $200. By than it was a foregone conclusion to the media. Apple could do no wrong. Every mutual fund had to have it on their sheets. Same mechanisms at work on Wall Street all the time. Just change the stock symbol…
There is something wrong with the stock and the people that own it.
Now you have something called OVERHEAD SUPPLY which is ‘beacoup’ shareholders underwater with their buys.
Throw in a miserable stock market mood, a ’sick’? Steve Jobs and you got yourself a reason to SELL.
Just wait until the options backdating scandal rears it’s ugly head again. Actually, don’t wait. Unless this stock clears all-time highs, there is really no reason for the average investor to own shares. Too messy, despite it’s greatness.
Mathew goes a little deeper and I agree with him that it’s not sick or disturbing to discuss, but major news that hopefully is not true and if is, seems rather material.
Has that risk just been neglected lately by the stock market in oricing Apple?
Posted on June 10th, 2008 | Category: Apple | Comments
After a long slog, Barack Obama may finally be on the cusp of securing his party’s nomination. But in the race for online video views, it was never even close (below). While countless variables are at play here, it can be safely inferred that a lot of Obama’s success is due to his attracting a younger, internet-savvy demographic, as well as having several of the most viral videos of the campaign (including the 1984 Apple spoof and the “Yes We Can” music video, including a recent successful “Podemos con Obama” follow-up–none of which were created by the campaign). Ron Paul captured a similar demographic, so much so that as of today he still has more cumulative views than Clinton. Of course, no one can compete with Chris Brown music videos (in blue below).
How does all of this affect the race? For one, online video views appear to correlate strongly with campaign contributions, which we here at TubeMogul outlined in a study earlier in the campaign.
Posted on June 2nd, 2008 | Category: Apple, Politics | Comments Off
Gaming has been ALL about boys…until NOW. The Wii has changed things and not in some ‘itsy bitsy’ couple year trend kind of thing, but in a big ball busting trend kind of way. I have seen the future and the future is…Rachel fighting Max for the Wii.
With Nintendo (NTDOY), the boys and ‘man boys’ markets are a LOCK. If you buy the stock today you need another catalyst…I mean the cats out of the bag no? They don’t do their own retail like Apple, you can’t play the games on an iPhone and you don’t play them on Macs. That said, I think they have a giant catalyst in girls, women and the family unit. If you are skeptical and refuse to buy a Wii, go to a friends house with your family and play Mario Kart.
If you don’t already own Nintendo (NTDOY) , you can’t blame me. I have been bullish and long since the 30’s, we Wallstripped it and now a year has past. Here’s a good post of mine from last May and not much has changed in the story except the price of the stock. In gigantic stocks, waiting for 10-15 percent pullbacks can be expensive. I was not early when I got in, but I never am. Obviously the question today after it has doubled yet again…is now too late?
I could bore you with metrics but that could not help me justify anything…thank goodness though because I would be broke if I only owned cheap, low P/E stocks. I bought some more this week for me and the kids despite it being off it’s all-time high and despite the fact that I have actually sold some at lower levels for my fund.
The chart and stock trajectory is breathtaking and a spitting image of Apple . I think both companies have a lot in common in what lies ahead (girls, women and families – Apple having the big edge with their fantastic retail), but this post is not about Apple.
Girls will play the Wii. Color me not totally convinced on Wii fit, but it can’t hurt and will continue to evolve and expand.
Our biggest KnightsBridge investment to date, and our first, was last year GreenScreen Games . One of their studios – SuperVillain (Tony Hawk) – has the major game launching and it’s for a market that is not their bread and butter – anyone but a boy.
Check out the next big type of gaming hit (click on image to enlarge):
The ‘girls, women and family unit’ is not factored into today’s prices because ANALysts have nothing to really compare it too. That’s good..
Gamestop (GME), despite my hate, has an almost monopoly and everybody is and will gun for that market – EXPANDING THE PIE. Best Buy (BBY), also despite my hate, can’t sell laptops, PC’s, washing machines, flat screens or music for profit anymore. But gaming…
PlayNTrade is one of the fastest growing franchises and I love this local Phoenix franchise idea of Gamestop on wheels called ‘The Game Truck ‘.
I am of the feeling that Nintendo could go wild still. I mean it gets Nasdaq ‘Pink Sheet’ love only and although the brand is everywhere, NOBODY owns the stock.
Do you? Better yet…does your cab driver?
PS – I still stand by my statement back in my March 2007 post…’If marijuana is legalized, all the gaming stocks double again overnight!’
PSS – I did a whole bullish trend scenario for gaming and did not mention ‘Guitar Hero’ or ‘Rock band’ even ONCE (until now ).
PSSS – When I think of ‘Breathtaking’, I think of Seinfeld (also the ‘Shrinkage’ episode):
PSSSS- Going offblog until Wednesday as the Lindzon’s hit the road for the summer. Don’t do anything crazy.
Disclosure – Long Nintendo, Electronic Arts and GreenScreen Games.
To understand why Apple is making a concerted effort to appeal to BlackBerry users, consider an analogy to the board game Risk. RIM has a large army (read: users), but they’re all massed together in one spot on the map. They care about email, they care about exactly the sort of enterprise features Apple has announced for the iPhone, and they are known to be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a handset. A lucrative target that can be attacked all at once. And the BlackBerry is weakest where the iPhone is strongest: web browsing, music, and video.
Compare and contrast with, say, a software platform like Windows Mobile, or a hardware maker like Nokia — their users are spread across a wide variety of phones and platforms. It was far easier to turn the iPhone into something almost every BlackBerry customer might at least consider than it would have been to make a lineup of iPhones that appeal to every Nokia customer.
RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft. Replace a BlackBerry with an iPhone (2.0) and the messages, contacts, and calendar events that sync over the network will be the same as the ones on the BlackBerry you just tossed into a desk drawer.
In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.
John – You had my attention at ‘RISK’. The great post won’t make you money tomorrow or even next week, but over time, bazillions are at stake.
Go pull up a chart of Apple and Dell the last 5 years. Nice paired trade.
Now I am not sure Apple can rise at the same pace it has and in a continued weak stock market, may fall a greater percentage from this point than Dell, but I know one thing….Dell is dead.
Occassionally when I read FAKE Steve Jobs, it sounds exactly like Steve Jobs would sound. FAKE’s take on Dell is spot on (I am biased though due to my growing short position).
Here are my fave outakes from the article:
The other reason Dell won’t rebound is that the company is yoked to Microsoft. Vista has hurt them tremendously. Don’t doubt it. All of the PC makers know this and they are furious about it. But what can they do? They put their future in the hands of the Beastmaster. They figured they could deal with the Borg’s evil nature; they didn’t anticipate having to deal with the Borg’s incompetence. You may remember that ten years ago people were saying Apple should cave in and become a Windows shop too. You know why we didn’t? Because even ten years ago El Jobso recognized that Windows had become a hairball and foresaw the problems that the Borg was bound to have as the hairball got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was bound to collapse. It had to. It’s like using a Volkswagen car kit to build a space shuttle.
So instead of putting our future in the hands of the MicroTards we undertook the massive effort of creating a next-generation operating system of our own. A lot of people, including some very smart ones, said this was crazy. Especially for a company with 2% market share. They said we were suicidal, ridiculous, old-fashioned, hubristic, doomed. The effort cost us huge amounts of time and money and was far from a sure bet. But my feeling is if you don’t dare bet on yourself and your own people, you shouldn’t be in business. So we made the bet. And now it is paying off in spades — on Macs and iPhones and other devices which we have not yet announced but will restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives, trust me.
Now as for Dell, well, you know what their big problem is? Dell doesn’t have me. Or anyone like me. Mostly because, let’s face it, there isn’t anyone else like me. I’m one of a kind. Sui generis, as the French say. What Dell has is Michael Dell. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a nice guy. And a smart guy. But he’s not a visionary. He’s not an artist. The stuff he’s good at — squeezing suppliers, screwing distributors — was very cool ten or fifteen years ago. Today? No big deal.
As FAKE Steve, REAL Dan quips…Dell is Gateway.
Time will tell, but I agree with him on his last line…if Dell is roadkill, there is nothing wrong with that, it’s a good thing.
It is a well deserved return to Wallstrip for Apple and Julie’s first shot at the ‘core’. It was the first stock Wallstrip covered back in October 2006 and has climbed 150 percent since.
Although it is well off it’s $200 high set in January of 2008, there is lot’s to be excited about:
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