DISQUS

Don't for a heartbeat think that this was the bottom. We still have to see the correction in the Dollar! We have pumped so much liquidity into the system yet the Dollar has yet to feel it's effect. Right now it's being propped up by massive foreign purchases as hedges against the falling Euro and Pound but that will soon end and it's valuation will plummet. 1% fed rate? Effective .67% overnight? $1+Trillion created out of thin air? Watch the dollar test it's lows of .74 or worse. Oil and other commodities won't reach their highs like earlier this year due to demand destruction but Gold and other currency placeholders will go back up. This has been a time-bomb waiting to happen and we are still in the middle of the explosion.

The only advantage of the dollar drop will be our exports will be more competitive which MIGHT help out the industrial sector but again, demand destruction will mute this effect.

I feel that Apple's recent Quarter will be great as usual but it will guide FAR lower that expected. Who gives a &(%@ about the past, it's the future that counts as far as P/E goes. What multiple will Apple deserve? Apple will survive but does it deserve a 20 P/E or a 14?

BTW - FANTASTIC new cocktail! Vodka, Lemonaide and pickled Ginger (the type you get eating sushi) diced. Yummy AND spicy!

I hate to be doom and gloom and I've been that guy for a few months now and sadly I've been right. This quarter might be fine but the guidance wont be hot and the reality wont be that good either. this is through no fault of Apple, it's just reality. I know a few people who are switching to MAC and I'll be buying an iMAC soon but still. Things are going down for a few quarters. Sure you could buy here and 4 years from now be ahead but if you stay in cash until next spring and get AAPL @ 40 you'll be even happier in 2011. AAPL great company and will no doubt survive. NASDQ -doomed.

Did the VIX really hit there? Damn! we got a long way to go......

Zune, aka Ruby Tuesday (is that where you work?) give some positive comments rather than tear daown Zack. What's your take on the situation? How would you handle the current crisis? Do you have any advice besides "invest".

I love a quality debate, seriously, it's how we learn. My dearest and longest friend and I get into fist fights occasionally over stupid shit but we always come back together. Debate is cool but you don't offer a counter argument to zack's positions, you just troll like a 14 year old. You have anger issues with out resolution. Somehow you think Zack is solely responsible for AAPL's decline. Perhaps you have more info than us and would care to educate the masses. Is Zack really Woz?

Seriously, give a clear, concise counter argument with out the sophmoric rhetoric. You migh gain some converts. Otherwise I'm sure Zack appreciates you comtribution to his page count and adding a dime or two to his massive coffers.

I just don't see the need to do ANY action right now. So much is still in the air, so many unanswered questions, too much info to still drop. I understand if one is working for a hedge fund, brokerage, etc..and they have to do SOMETHING everyday but for those of us civilians dear lord, hang tight. We have a long way to go down. AA's recent shitty earnings, BAC's dillution and there is plenty more to go. Hang tight, buy GLD on down days and Winterize your lawn.

I keep track all day on certain equities and indexes and dollar levels but otherwise I'm a house-husband and student. Unless there is a financial gun to your head I say smoke a bowl and watch the Flintstones.

Zack, I gotta tip my hat to you for trying to bring rational thought to the asylum but lunatics are on the grass. We can bet on the movement of the rain drops but it's only fun with a Long Island Iced Tea in hand. For me, sit back, analyze the movements and look at the long term ramifications and the short term reactions but save your cash for booze.

This was sent to me by my brother-in-law, a bond guy with JP Morgan:
If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you would have
$2.50 left of the original $1,000. With AIG, you would have less
than $15 left. But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer
one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for
the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash. Based
on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink
heavily and recycle.

Amen!

DB - Hey man, I'm sorry I got side track by this BS. Fact of the matter your question is far more germain to the real world than ZUNE and you deserve a reply, my apologizes for hijacking this thread.

Obviously since you asked the question, aapl has had a MAJOR slide. The question you have to ask yourself is, how long is your outlook. What is the purpose of your portfolio, what do you want it to do for you and in what period of time. Hopefully you have a long horizon because things for the consumer tech sector are going to be weak for a long time (6 months - 2 years or so). I don't know what your cost basis is so I can' give specific advice but if you gave more info about how you invest, IRA, 401k or just plain ol investing it would help. Do you use options, shorting, etc..

I'm glad to help you out but always understand that you must do your own homework and make your own decisions. For all you know I'm a crossdressing South Korean playing a Starcraft and this is my undercover persona. If you ask some of the regular posters here or just look at some of my posts here and on the Board and especially the old Google board you'll see that I actually am pretty level headed and try to be helpful. It's just I've been gone for 3 weeks and the trolls have come out from under the bridge and I feel like PaPa BillyGoat Gruff.

T

Wow! You should start a blog! HOW I WENT LONG FROM DOW 14000 TO 10000 & DIN' LOOSE JACK! I would be VERY interested to learn your secrets. Don't fall for the old saw "it's not a loss until you take it". If you are still long in this market you have lost significant value. You may still be in the black but you have lost value. Remember, It's buy low, SELL high. Not buy low and hold forever and then sell in the middle somewhere or maybe high but 20 years down the road but in the mean time the 10 years in between my company's stock has been trailing and not really performing but I love the company so it's cool but all that capital is dead until I realize it.

BTW - you do realize by commenting on this blog you hate so much you are adding to it's viewership thus increasing it's value and lining Evil Zack's massive coffers from the huge revenue that these blogs make. Kinda weird, huh?

Totally! Every Market up and down has been caused by Zack's manipulations! The man is Capitalist Puppetmaster! What he doesn't tell us is he controls over $20 bil in his discretionary fund and waits for us little guys to follow him lemming-like and then POW! he calls all his fundie friends, Jamie Dimon, Buffett and Soros and hammers us! The sick little monkey.....

Get a clue........go back to watching Loose Change and writing love letters to Alex Jones. If you've lost money it's because you suck at trading/investing, not because of Zack or anybody else. Take some self-responsibility.

I sadly agree.

Apple definately has an advantage over Rimm in that it's a diversified consumer electronincs/software company so no single egg defines the basket on paper but let's face it; Apple is iPod/iPhone even if the #'s don't say it. The Street is screwy and even if Mac sales rocket, if iPod sales show further weakness and the iPhone #'s don't make up for it them it's gonna be ugly. But that's not really the concern. We know that iPhone numbers are pretty darn good. The issue is going to be forward outlook/margin numbers. Apple and Rimm are high multiple companies and they way you get to deserve a high multiple is by growth and if Apple's margins are contracting without massive sales numbers to offset it then the multiple must contract. And in this environment that contraction is brutal.

Another reason Rimm and Apple are better comparisons than say Dell or Nintendo is that both Apple and Rimm are status symbols, lifestyle brands. Dell is a Kia, Rimm is a Mercedes limo and Apple is the entire Mercedes line.

Truth be told I think Rimm will do better in the short term than Apple since a majority of Rimm's business is, business which has a tendency to keep purchasing product in a decline rather than the consumer. It can't keep up it's growth which will contract it's multiple but it will keep it's core audience just fine. Hopefully the iPhone can finally solve it's stability issues once and for all and really get it's teeth into Enterprise. My 3G, even after updates, keeps crashing and a friend who's a voice broker on Exotics trades is bugging out over the crashes of his. We all love it as a consumer product but it's still not as stable as a BB. C'mon Steve-O! I don't want to switch!!!

I agree, the IMMEDIATE future is bleak but in the long term Apple has a HUGE chance of gaining considerable market share and is positioned to weather the storm better than most. the big question is going to be hpw long and how deep this economic trench is going to be.

As I've said, I'm in cash and will not buy any consumer discretionary company right now, especially one that doesn't give a dividend but Apple is on the top of my list when the fog clears and I'll still continue to buy their products when I can.

After watching the debates I'm not too optimistic, neither one shone and neither one flopped but neither one would admit that we need to seriously cut back on spending AND raise taxes a bit to clear out our massive deficit - and trust me I hate taxes. I'm the son of an Audit side accountant and the son-in-law of a CPA so I speak taxes and I hate 'em but we got bills to pay, big time.....

Everybody out there, whether I like ya or not, keep your cash tight, buy gold (the real stuff not the etf) and be conservative and we'll get through this and can debate another day.

Well, Mark to Market is a good thing if you have shares in one of these companies. It prevents them from hiding the garbage and shareholders and bondholders have a right to know. The 3% bad paper figure (or 1 or 2) is a misnomer. Approx 3% are defaulting right now but the rest of the papers value has fallen with the housing market so while you have people making payments, the collateral they have, the home, is worth less than the loan which makes the likelyhood of default far greater. Another problem is, even though a vast majority of these loans are being paid timely they were mis-rated. Almost all were given AAA or Alt-A and investigation has proven this to be false (thanks MBIA, Moody's etc!) so their value is wrong. Sarb/Ox and Mark to Market was implimented to give transperancy which allows more intelligent investing but if the figures are fudges from the get go it doesn't matter.

My beef with the bill is the speed they are trying to jam this thing down our throats. With this much money and the ramifications this will cause the face of American Capitalism DEMAND clear thinking. I mean it took over a year to ok the Sirius/XM deal and we want to do this in a week? THAT'S crazy.

I also feel that for every $ spent buying crap loans we put a $ towards a New Deal infrastructure project to put some asses to work. These loans wont pay themselves. People need jobs, we still need better high tech infrastructure and if we are going to dillute the dollar we might as well get some fiber optic, wimax, windmmill, new roads out of it.

Apologies for all the mis-spellings

I gotta ask RT, do you really think Zack's articles effect the Market? Really? I mean maybe if you took every blogger out there that talks about Apple and combined the investment portfolio value that is slotted for AAPL you might get enough to move to move the price a dollar or two for a few minutes but I'd say that's about it. This isn't some Penny Stock we're talking about. Take your soapbox to the hedgefunds, banks and Market Makers. They are the ones who move stuff. And I haven't seen Zack push around any rumors, in fact he railed against the whole SJ looking too thin thing as much as anybody.

Breaking the law is well...illegal. It should be prosecuted, no doubt. Sadly they don't. Shorting isn't illegal, or wasn't until recently, but if you want it too be then write your Representatives. That's their job. In the current environment you have a better chance. But running around crying about it and calling names and what not isn't going to change anything except maybe make you feel better about yourself.

And instead of cutting and pasting articles, try offering some of your own insight. What would YOU suggest to do during this current crisis? Where are you putting your money? Give us a strategy. Remember, a great deal of us here are traders so it is VERY common to go long and short on alternating days so that shouldn't supprise you. Since it seems like you are a long term planner do you suggest buying now? What's your time frame? What position sizing should we use? Do we go all in now or buy in bits and pieces? What's your stop-loss point? What's your target price? Help us out and drop some knowledge.

Instead of always trying to tear Zack down, why don't you try building yourself up by giving solid, well though out advice. you don't always have to be right. If you where you'd be too rich to waste your time reading this blog or any blog for that matter so it's ok to be wrong, shit happens. Give yourself some credibility. Zack is very generous to dissenting voices, he hasn't deleted your account yet and unless you threaten violence I doubt he ever will. but do the rest of us a favor and show to us that you are more than a screamer.

I still don't understand why anybody would be trying to trade in this environment. Fundamentals don't matter and neither do technicals. It's all news/fear/hope trading right now. Sure one could try to get that juicy bottom but it's not worth it. The easy "down" money has been played so shorting is becoming more and more risky. Going "long" is still a long way off. We are in a stagnation tumble and will most likely be there for some time. Until a true pattern shows itself, cash and maybe gold on a strong dip.

Again, Apple is a wonderful company but the stock is gonna test the Feb/Mar lows. Big problem is, Apple sandbags it's numbers. Everybody and their dog knows this. They always beat their numbers and we saw the big dip that happened last quarter when it guided lighter with lower margin warnings. What's gonna happen when they actually MEET their numbers? It's ugly out there and it's not Apple's fault or Rimm's fault or what ever but we all breathe the same air and it's getting pretty thin up here.

Seriously, I'd start buying real estate and rent it out. It's going to get harder and harder to qualify for a loan so more and more people are going to have to rent and will want more than an apartment. THAT'S an investment, you and the bank.

Also Claudio, yes poor use of credit is a major culprit here but we're talking 30:1 levels here. I know that my margin account doesn't give me that much rope to hang myself with.

It just seems to me that this crisis have really brought out the crazy in all of us. I hate to say it but if anybody had been trading these past couple of months you were unreasonably greedy. I called going to cash after Apple failed to break 170 2 months ago. Yeah I missed the big 5 day rally but so what? I missed all this crap too. I've been pure cash because as I've stated this is only the beginning of this mess and until a clear direction is established then it is a casino with no free drinks. Expect oil to get to 140 again and stabilize from the diluted dollar.

Fact is EVERYBODY who engages in the Markets is a speculator. No matter who much the fundamentals say a company is strong, worthy, etc, when you put your money down in that company you are speculating that it's value will increase.

You also decry speculators and you have engaged in speculation.

Now THAT's a valid question. And if Zack doesn't answer it then he deserves to be called on it. We don't always have to like the answers we get in life but it's still always nice to get an answer anyway.

Being a card carrying member of the North American Marlon Brando Look A-likes, I have my concerns...

mf, the thing is I had to take off the site for a while and when I come back there is a deluge of people calling zack underhanded and question his motives and I find these comments unfounded and off track. Catch me up, has anything happened in the past 3-4 weeks? (besides the obvious market turmoil of course - I've not been trading but I'm not dead). I have zero problems with debate, in fact I thrive on it and find it's the Socratian method of eduction the best. But In my short history when I see what appears to me to be slander it usually means /b type trolling.

Like I said, maybe his stuff has been hashed out in the past few weeks and I've missed it and if that is so, sorry. But otherwise the Zack bashing seems really rather weird. I hate Rush Limbaugh but I don't waste my time listening to him or writing to his blog or whatever he has. When people go after a site owner like zack it seems to me the poster is bored and is just filling their free time or get a rush out of being provocative. They guise this as altrulism but never really offer salvation. If I am off base, i appologize but I gotta calls them as I see them.

as for u RT, you are a failure if you didn't read any of my posts and see the care and thought I put into creating a reasonable, valid, highly educated response. I gave examples, methods, history and time. If you can counter my arguments using the same thoughtfulness then I would applaude you (or anybody else for that matter), but when the responses are simplistic Cramerisms I call bullshit. Somebody reads Rule One Investing and they think they have the Market cornered.

I actually enjoy zack's writing and it would be pretty lame for me to find value in his insight and just stand buy and let people slander him. Anybody who sits but silently is pretty spineless in my opinion. Just as you feel some how justified in your comments, I too feel justified in mine. The difference is I back my shit up.

Claudio, you know I like you but I gotta call you on this. I've helped you "gamble" as you call it. I watched you trade shares of aapl, sell them in a day or two and take profit, wait and buy more shares at lower prices and run them up again and even more money. Why is ok for you to speculate on that but no one else? Because you really love Apple? C'mon. You may know that but the stock doesn't care. So you don't use margin, wise move but millions use margin every day and pay back their debts fine. Should margins be made tighter, sure. ALL debt levels need to be seriously reconsidered in this country/world. The problem is when crisis' occurr too often the baby gets thrown out with the bath water.

Speculation is fine, it's what makes markets liquid. Leverage is fine when used wisely. Shorting is fine, it's what allows us to hedge.

Macfan, stop be a self rightous troll. If you hate sack so much go somewhere else, it's sacks sight after all. Man up and start your own super altrulistic fun site I'f you such the egoless analyst.

I'm curious macfan, why don't you go back to doing what you do when you are not telling other people what to do?

How about the individual? I mean, all of the above is a true choice as well but ultimately we are responsible for our own decisions, our own votes, our own choices. The vast majority of the USA ignored the warnings as well as Wall Street, Congress, etc...