Another fresh assault on Apple stock

Another day, another short. I'll eventually have to believe a recent article about manipulation of the Apple stock price. And it's not only the traders themselves that push the price over the cliff. It's the entire charade helping to make this happen, the specialised media, ambitious bloggers, and the Press (online and print) who altogether combine forces to doom the stock. The latter proved extremely volatile to similar assaults. In fact, Apple's fundamentals do not justify at all the extremely low E/P multiples, but despite what is true for every other company, it doesn't seem to hold for Apple these days. It's like a shedload of short-selling traders and other Apple haters decided to go after the company.

They then spread in orchestrated fashion all sorts of (untrue and unqualified) rumours, or exaggerate non events while choosing to mute important, and as premarket trading opens the assault is already under way. This morning the bad 'news' was spread by WSJ, and has been reinforced about three times every five minutes by Bloomberg's Betty Liu. Like she had nothing else to report, for crying out loud! All media seemed to repeat the same ol' song: Apple cut iPhone 5 component orders to its Far East suppliers. Thus, it's iPhone is gonna be losing grounds against rival Samsung and Android powered smartphones. Was this news at all? Apparently not. It was old news. By the time this torrent of negativity hit the market I got an internal UBS report on my email saying that the fact reported by WSJ has already been known for a month, and had been reported too, by UBS among others. It indeed hit the markets early December last year!!! Apparently this morning gambler traders wanted this to happen again and scare other traders away from the stock, force margin calls, and push the price as low as it can get. And all this happening only a breath away from Apple's announcement of 1Q13 results in the coming days. If those reports prove stellar again (which they will), then we'll witness a huge jump northwards, and those same gamblers shall eventually profit accordingly. It's all about making an easy buck, that is...

Before year-end 2012 the story went that the stock should drop because of the fiscal cliff risks. Now, with that phoney scare being out of the way, gambling traders need to pull other lies off their sleeves. As an example, I was reading a report earlier this morning saying that Samsung climbed from 8% to over 30% in terms of market share in smartphones, whereas Apple fell from 23 to 18%. All this is based on data of well 'respected' analysts, mind you. I wonder though. Is that so that all Samsung and other Android smartphone owners are so embarrassed about their tools that they never show them in public? Honest to God, I see iPhones everywhere, in all social classes and age demographics. I see nothing than iPhones. It's almost painful. How come I never see any smartphones of the South-Korean market leaders? TV sets? Fine. But smartphones? Lots of billboards and media ads! But the real thing? If you still doubt, do the math: Walk anywhere you can think of. A movie theater, a bar, a supermarket, a business meeting. Ask everyone to show their phones. Count them and calculate percentages. And then tell me who's the freakin' market leader! I believe this is a world-wide scam orchestrated by some extremely powerful 'unknown' money owners to turn their short-selling objectives into a self fulfilling prophecy about the greatest company our mankind has ever known. And destroy its valuation! To simply enrich themselves further by sheer gambling and not by any form of honest labour.

Apple is a company that actually has re-written the management science syllabus all over again. Harvard and Stanford hot shots must experience a serious frustration with this. Have an 'agnostic' smartass like Jobs, with no descent degree whatsoever other than high school, tell them how to build their teaching curricula?!?! Gimme a break, dude! But I am not surprised of the behaviour of nay-sayers. In their rather 'pretentious' anti-monopolistic free-market obsession Americans will always try to bring down their best homegrown entrepreneurships, first IBM, then Microsoft, now Apple. Google next. Maybe Amazon too. Who knows? Nonetheless, their list of billionaires keeps rising. We never had as many as now. Owning trillions of dollars in cumulative fortune and material possessions. It's during moments like these that I miss Steve the most. I don't know, Tim may be a great guy, but should Steve still be around I'm sure he'd have uttered something nasty that could turn the 4-month old anti-Apple tsunami back against those Apple haters themselves.

Another article I read this morning compares recent IDC reports claiming a volume shrinkage of US Mac sales during the last holiday quarter by 2% whereas the Gartner group reported a 5% growth. How can two such notorious and sophisticated analysts agree to disagree so widely apart on such simple and fundamental stats? Apparently, they often seem to disagree, it has been observed, being rivals of course. Who is right and who is wrong then? Answer: the one who serves your own personal objectives is the one you will select as the right one. There's no science about it. In the world of traders you can prove anything you like with numbers and reports. To the AAPL bearish it's gonna be the IDC, to the bullish it's undoubtedly Gartner. Question is, who pulls the strongest in this tug of war of short sellers vs long buyers during a day's trading? The rest is just fairy tales in print, feeding the masses with daily bullshit! So, keep cool and ride the wave at the 'right' moment. Don't panic, don't listen to them nay-sayers, use your brain and not your heart, and you'll exactly know when the moment arrives. Trust me on this...