Helter-Skelter

It's true that you can make or lose sh*tloads of greenbucks by playing with volatile stocks. Volatility is generally measured by fluctuations of daily price around daily averages. Visually, volatile stock price graphs look like the Alps where non volatile look more like the Flanders fields. Volatility is very often caused by emotions of the masses stirred usually by the tabloid behavior of some cheap reporters and analysts. One of the best (recent) examples I saw yesterday by a JP Morgan Asian analyst (a bloke called Kevin Chang) reporting that before end of this year Apple will launch a scaled down version of the iPhone. He rationalized his claim by referring to recent Apple patent filings (see schema), 'inside info' from Apple's third party Far East suppliers and some common knowledge about the European launch of the iPhone. Few hours later, a peer of Chang's from the same JP Morgan (West-Side story, this time), a bloke called Bill Shope carefully reported that his young Asian colleague has been 'more Catholique than the Pope' in his enthusiast predictions. However the damage was already done. Scores of new reporters pulled out of their word-processors hundreds of fresh related articles and news agencies flashed 'stop-the-press' style live-updates. In a spectacularly 'down' market (give and take minus 150 points on the DJ Industrials Index, and minus 30 for Nasdaq) AAPL, way overpriced and peta-volatile, was up 2 points.

Another reporter from Blackfriars Communications, a fellow called Carl Howe took a deep breath and put his grey matter to work. A nice article came out. You can read that report here.

His analysis makes a lot of sense to the point, you, as a reader, start wondering: "Jeez, the guy's right! How come I haven't thought of that myself?". The reason is simple... it's mass psychology. I must eventually admit that the collective IQ score of any crowd of humans, size larger than one, must be in the low nineties. Emotions overtake logic and opportunistic freetards rush to play with volatility and lose money... like wasting a weekend in Vegas. On top of all this, our beloved cyberspace adds a degree of power amplification to any similar event. 'Sell' and 'Buy' orders arrive in greased lightnin' mode at brokers' desks in the millions and the NYSE bloke, the one who tolls the 'Lutine' bell to kick-off the day's trading, will hardly have the time to put the bell away and AAPL shares will have been bought and sold in seven figure volume numbers.

As a trivia, current Apple market cap is twice that of Dell's, higher than Nokia's and very close to overtake HP's. All that with 'only' 23 Billion of revenue and one third of Microsoft's net income. His Jobness is definitely gonna be canonized...

Here's the thing... Despite all emotions and the fact that sh*tloads of dollars are made or lost in volatility, which is nothing new really, the thing I like most about events like these is the energy involved. Man o' man. Check out CNBC reporters on their early morning programme and you'll see what I mean. Maria Bartiromo... 'love of my life'!