Posts Tagged
‘Steve Jobs’
by phil - January 18th, 2011 8:29 am
I already sent out an Alert to Members this morning.
Obviously, with the Steve Jobs situation, everyone is wondering how to play things. At the time (7:03) I thought the fact that AAPL was only down 3.7%, at $335, seemed fake and ridiculous – but what else is new in this market? Our position was to short pretty much everything as the Nas futures were all the way back to 2,310, which was not even down half a point from Friday’s close and some simple math tells us that AAPL is over 20% of the Nasdaq so a 5% drop in AAPL will take the Nasdaq down 1% while a 20% drop in AAPL will take the Nasdaq down 4% – right back to the 50 DMA at 2,640 and that seems like a reasonable pullback – especially when you consider that 2% of the current 2,755 was a result of Friday’s ridiculous rally.
Surely at least we would expect the loss of Steve Jobs to AT LEAST put the Nasdaq back to Friday’s open at 2,730 (2,300 in the futures) but I’ll be very surprised if we don’t at least test that 50 DMA so that will be our watch line for the week. Oddly enough, we had been discussing Steve Jobs’ health as one of the key unpriced market risks last Thursday, when I said to Members (in response to why I preferred a very defensive AAPL spread to holding the stock):
AAPL/Iflan – As I said to Maya, I like my above AAPL trade better than cash but I do not like AAPL stock better than cash because you can only sell 10% worth of protection and that caps your gains at 10% (and we can do better with cash) and it also doesn’t cover the risk of Steve Jobs catching a cold or just coughing on stage, which could cost you 20% very quickly.
In fact, concerns of AAPL and Jobs’ health were the premise for pressing our QID bets in February (see our $10,000 Virtual Portfolio Review), where I said at the time: "QID/Drum – Well since we were saved from doom on USO I got brave and went for a DD on the QID Feb $10s (now .82) and I think that’s worth the risk into expiration and the following weekend. Same goes for waiting on the…

Tags: AAPL, CHINA, DIA, EU, QID, Retail, SQQQ, Steve Jobs
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by ilene - January 17th, 2011 5:51 pm
TIME, Techland, reports: Steve Jobs To Take Medical Leave Of Absence

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Courtesy of Doug Aamoth
This is kind of an odd press release, but Businesswire has just put up something simply titled Apple Media Advisory that apparently contains the following e-mail from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to all Apple employees:
"Team,
At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.
I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.
I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.
Steve"
Jobs has been no stranger to medical ailments in the past. You may recall that he underwent a liver transplant back in 2009 as part of a six-month leave of absence to treat pancreatic cancer. We’ll keep an eye on this story and update it accordingly.
Tags: AAPL, Apple, leave of absence, Steve Jobs
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by ilene - November 16th, 2010 1:39 pm
Courtesy of William Banzai7, Zero Hedge
Apple is apparently ready to make another big announcement today. This will supposedly be yet another day that we will never forget.
This got me thinking about how many days there have been in my life so far that I will really never forget.
I vaguely remember being born. Lots of bright lights. I remember getting my first bicycle. I can remember a particular summer vacation day in New Hampshire when I was about 5 years old. I remember exactly where I was when JFK was assassinated. I don’t remember the Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy assassinations very well. I remember seeing Jimi Hendrix live in NYC. I remember some other important days like my high school and college graduations, the days my kids were born, the day I was married…and divorced. I remember 9/11 very well, I remember the day AIG claimed they had absolutely no exposure to subprime risk and I remember the September day Lehman tanked. I remember the day Paulsen and Bernanke said we were all doomed and I remember the day Obama was elected…
What could Apple possibly be planning that we will never forget?
Can it be this?
or this?

How about this…

or maybe even this…

or this…

All of the above would probably excite me more than an Beatles/Apple music deal with iTunes or an announcement concerning live streaming iTunes. But I am not quite sure I would remember any of it for the rest of my life.
Here, however, is an event I am pretty sure I would remember at least until the next AAPL quarterly announcement…

AAPL Fight Club 2010
I remember the last time I heard this type of extraordinary claim coming from a Silicon Valley darling…

But I can’t remember what it was that they announced.
AAPL…10:00 AM EST today…
"The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death."--Harry Houdini
UPDATE

Tags: AAPL, Apple, market, Steve Jobs, stocks
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by ilene - July 25th, 2010 9:21 pm
Decoupling between stock prices and the domestic economy – and Zachary Karabell explains why he believes this trend will continue. – Ilene
By Zachary Karabell, courtesy of TIME
Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME
From the beginning of May until late June, stock markets worldwide declined sharply, with losses surpassing 10%. The first weeks of July brought only marginal relief. Ominous voices began to warn that the weakness of stocks was a direct response to the stalling of an economic recovery that has lasted barely a year. Anxiety over debt-laden European countries — most notably Greece — combined with stubbornly high unemployment in the U.S. to create a toxic but fertile mix that allowed concern to blossom into full-bloom fear.
The most common refrain was that stocks are weak because global economic activity is sagging. A July 12 report by investment bank Credit Suisse was titled Are the Markets Forecasting Recession? With no more stimulus spending on the horizon in the U.S., Europeans on austerity budgets and consumer sentiment best characterized as surly, the sell-off in stocks was explained as a simple response to an economy on the ropes.
It’s a good story and a logical one. But it distorts reality. Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.
As a result, stocks are not proxies for the U.S. economy, or that of the European Union or China, and markets are deeply unreliable gauges of anything but the underlying strength of the companies they represent and the schizophrenic mind-set of the traders who buy and sell the shares. There has always been a question about just how much of a forecasting mechanism markets are. Hence the saying that stocks have…

Tags: AAPL, Cash, companies, consumer sentiment, corporations, Economy, forecasts, global economy, Globalization, Steve Jobs, Stock Market, traders
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by ilene - June 8th, 2010 1:53 pm
Courtesy of Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker
Over the last month, US markets have been burned to a crisp. Blame it on Europe, blame it on a softening of our own recovery data, blame it on the end of earnings season, blame it on the end of quantitative easing, blame it on the Gulf spill, blame it on the engineered cool-off in China.
Is it too soon to eulogize the March 2009 – April 2010 bull market, a 78% performer that even the most bullish never really believed in the entire way up? Depends on which support lines and moving averages you happen to be fixated on at the moment.
But it is certainly not too early to lament the Things We Lost In The Fire - the idiosyncrasies of the Impossible Rally that we may have lost for good. These include:
Apple as the Michael Jordan of the NASDSAQ- Steve Jobs had us from hello, we clamored around the television for each product release and conference, and Mr. Jobs did not disappoint. Nor did Apple stock, which seemed to go up 3 to 5 points a day for what seemed like an endless stretch of time. It was a reminder to stockpickers everywhere that ETFs didn’t control everything- that you could get one right on research. The release of the iPad and the move toward shattering the $300 per share mark epitomized the release of our pent-up optimism and will always be remembered as a special time in market history.
Cree Research, Green Mountain Coffee and Baidu- The hottest of hot…

Tags: Apple, Baidu, BULL MARKET, CREE, Green Mountain Coffee, rally, Steve Jobs, Stock Market, wall of worry
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by ilene - August 4th, 2009 12:30 am
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Courtesy of
TIME, by Josh Quittner
In a shockingly unsurprising move, Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple Inc.’s board of directors today. This was inevitable, since both companies are staking their future growth on the explosion in mobile computing. So why did it take so long?
Three years ago, the mobile horizon looked very different from how it has turned out. Google was working on Android, its open-source-ish operating system for cellular phones. Its strategy: Let a million mobile phones blossom! So long as Google products — search, maps, documents — ran on them, Google would win, since Google ads would, presumably, continue to flow. Google would be baked into Android, of course, but it would also be on BlackBerrys and Nokias and Windows Mobile phones. And when the first iPhone went on sale two summers ago, Google apps, including YouTube integration, were core to the experience. (Schmidt even joined Jobs onstage when the first iPhone was announced.) (See the best iPhone applications.)
In fact, when that first phone launched, most people believed that the apps it would run would be retooled Web apps — you’d visit a New York Times mobile website that was optimized for the iPhone’s browser, for instance. (One popular theory advanced by Apple insiders is that Steve Jobs himself was against an Apple apps play for a long time and only came around to the notion late in the iPhone’s development.) Look at the lip service Apple itself paid to the "Web 2.0" integration — developing for the iPhone would be as open and easy as creating websites!
But a funny thing happened on the way to the App Store: native apps took off, probably beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Given a choice between using the browser and using native apps, for most iPhone users there was no choice. Native apps won, hands down. With more than 65,000 apps available for the iPhone today, some pundits speculate that apps use, rather than Web use, will be where all the action is within a decade.
That threatens to marginalize Google, limiting its growth. The mobile world is becoming bifurcated: On one side sits the Google-dominated, browser-based Web and its related Web apps. On the other sits native applications that you download to the iPhone (and other…

Tags: Apple, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs
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by ilene - July 5th, 2009 5:40 pm
I’ve added a few comments at the end, relying on old information, but from the content of this article, there’s been no improvement in the situation in the last 15 years. Thanks to Joe for bringing up this important topic! – Ilene
Courtesy of Joe Weisenthal at ClusterStock
The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby writes that the Steve Jobs liver transplant, and the fact that he may have put his name on the list of several states in order to ensure maximum odds of getting a liver, is a reminder of how horribly broken and dysfunctional this current system is.
What we need is a market mechanism to compensate and encourage organ donors:
No one would dream of suggesting that medical care is too vital or sacred to be treated as a commodity, or to be bought and sold like any other service. If the law prohibited any “valuable consideration’’ for healing the sick, the result would be far fewer doctors and far more sickness and death.
The result of our misguided altruism-only organ donation system is much the same: too few organs and too much death. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the national organ waiting list. Last year, 28,000 transplants were performed, but 49,000 new patients were added to the queue. As the list grows longer, the wait grows deadlier, and the shortage of available organs grows more acute. Last year, 6,600 people died while awaiting the kidney or liver or heart that could have kept them alive. Another 18 people will die today. And another 18 tomorrow. And another 18 every day, until Congress fixes the law that causes so many valuable organs to be wasted, and so many lives to be needlessly lost.
The fact that we have so many people waiting for kidneys, waiting on expensive and painful dialysis, is proof of how bad the system is, since healthy people don’t need two kidneys, and since having only one kidney doesn’t increase your own odds of getting sick (kidney failure strikes both at the same time, typically).
Rather than delve into all the details of how it would work in practice, let’s just consider some common objections to organ markets, and why they’re all so
…

Tags: Economy, Health, Legal, Steve Jobs, U.S. Government
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