We'll undoubtedly see some sort of fall for samsung. Apple is releasing larger screen iPhones, android competitors in every market are becoming more aggressive , etc.
I'm assuming you are saying Apple understands the market better because they are doing something (releasing iphone with bigger screen) at correct time to defeat samsung.
Isn't that what Samsung did by coming out with the bigger screened phones? Samsung knew the market was ready for bigger screens when Apple didn't think so, no?
Firstly, Samsung isn't defeating anyone. Most of the devices they ship are unprofitable low end devices. This makes for a single impressive sounding headline, but has little to do with their competitive position.
Secondly - Samsung was forced to sell bigger screen phones because they couldn't achieve good battery life with smaller devices.
First, I NEVER said Samsung was defeating anyone in my post. But come to think of it, Samsung has defeated pretty much every other Android phone makers. But again, I never said Samsung was defeating anyone.
Not only that, Samsung was more profitable than apple for 2 consecutive quarters in 2013 before newer iPhones were released. Of course ton of other profits of samsung came from non-phones.
http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-is-now-a-more-profita...
You may not have said Samsung was defeating anyone in your earlier comment, but you implied it, and now you have said it.
Samsung has defeated all old brands that attempted to survive by adopt android, but is now itself being defeated by cheaper new Chinese brands that can steal its low end share while Apple consumes the high end.
What is the point of mentioning Samsung's temporary high profits from other sources when we are discussing phone strategy?
Well I fell into the same hole as you did. IMO, you don't defeat a company. Because a defeated company can always come back.
Apple almost disappeared. Samsung suffered seriously from the Asian financial crisis.
But any how, what's your source for this statement:
Secondly - Samsung was forced to sell bigger screen phones because they couldn't achieve good battery life with smaller devices.
I agree with Gruber that the "missed expectations" expression is misleading.
Analysts' expectations were not in line with reality. The iPhone numbers are what they are, irrespective of incompetent analysis.
A fairer way to state this would be that analysts, as usual, were over-optimistic and this optimism caused a lot of investors to be overly optimistic too, which caused an over-inflated share price, now corrected.
How in the world anyone should rely on analysts’ expectations?
These analysts were just guessing and almost all of them were guessing wrong in the past.
It is akin to predicting to the scores for NFL Football game.
This happens every single time Apple gives an earnings report. AAPL rises before the report and falls after the report. If I had the money I would short the stock every single time.
That's not how shorting works. You short the stock and NOW YOU HAVE THE MONEY but you OWE the stock to whomever you borrowed it from. If the stock goes up, you lose. If it goes down, you use the cash you have to buy it back and keep the rest.
The price of that uncertainty is what you capture in the options pricing model. aka. "premium"
Two scenarios:
(Short-selling) AAPL: Sell 10 lots (1000 shares) short -> now you OWE someone 1000 shares but have the cash in your account of 1000 shares worth of AAPL stock. The next day, AAPL loses 99% of its value, you buy the shares back at their now 1% value, deliver them to the person you borrowed them from, and keep the rest of the cash in your account. OR, the next day, the shares DOUBLE, and now you owe that person shares that are worth twice as much as you got selling them in the first place. Bad news. Nearly 100% loss on the trade.
(Buying a Put Option) You buy 10 AAPL PUT contracts (100 shares each) "at the money" (strike price equal to the last sale of AAPL) for $XX that expire at some point in the future (lets say one month). Anytime between now and then, if the price of AAPL doubles, your PUT OPTION maymost-likely will be worth more than what you paid for it and you can sell it for whatever the market wants to pay for it. If you do nothing, at the end of 30 days, your option is worth exactly ZERO.
The difference in the price movements of the underlying securities in both scenarios is what makes up the premium you pay OVER AND ABOVE what the difference is between what the security trades at and the price you paid for that "option" on the security.
It's like you understand the theory but not the practice of how this works?
In reality, you "short" a stock by purchasing a Put option. For example, these are made up numbers, but if you thought Apple would tumble on earnings and wanted to short it, you'd buy, say, $525 put options. This is a contract to sell 100 shares of apple at $525. It's worthless if they trade above $525 but if it drops below, you're in the money.
Suppose you pay $150 per contract, and you short 1000 shares -- 10 contracts. The most you can lose is $1500. And if the stock tumbled down to, say, $475, you would make $525-$475 = $50 * 1000 shares = $50,000, or $48,500 profit.
But the most you can ever lose is what you paid for the options.
And that's exactly it. The commenter doesn't understand the wildly different processes or effects of going those two different routes.
For one thing, a put (or call) option doesn't even trade on the same markets (usually), has a lot less liquidity (usually), and depends on the supply of people willing to write contracts against positions they already hold. (non-naked) Options also have the effect of limiting any possible loss to the price paid for the option.
When you short a stock, your loss is potentially UNLIMITED. In practice, your broker will buy the stock for you with whatever cash you have on hand if the price moves against you.
That doesn't happen with options but you also don't get the huge sums of money to play with by borrowing against a stock that you don't own but are positive will dive into the dirt.
Taking a short position on a security is a strategy.
Buying Puts is a tactic. Short Selling is also a tactic. Both accomplish the same goal of holding a short position -- making money when the price drops.
If you want to take a short position, you can buy Puts. And to wit, if you're a retail investor wanting a short position, this is most often how you'd do it.
Trading the derivitive here is a smarter play for precicely the reason I mentioned: It limits risk. Liquidity on the options market doesn't matter at all because if the price rises, your Puts are worthless anyway. And if it drops, you don't need to sell the contracts, you can execute them (on margin if necessary) and unwind the position that way.
"Going short" a security has a very specific meaning in the equities market. Same with "going long".
And buying puts is NOT the same thing. You've completely forgotten about the concept of premium and time value when pricing an option. For one thing, options are sold at MANY price levels (strike prices) and expiration dates.
Seriously man, with all due respect, you're so mistaken its scary. One of my colleagues designed the NYSE trading network and back-office trade clearing systems. This is how I earn my living. I'll bet you your 401(k) you can't get a floor trader to endorse that explanation you just gave. It's so wrong that I'm only commenting to give other people a chance to learn from your mistake.
That price is per share. So, for roughly $4011, you can buy the right to SELL 100 shares of AAPL between now and Jan-2015 for about one hundred dollars per share LESS than what it's closing price was yesterday. Figuring in the premium, that's about $140 loss per share built into that trade yet there are 1300 OPEN contracts for just that. By your thinking, those puts should be worthless, right?
Moreover, there are already ~1300 OTHER put contracts out there at this exact same strike/expiration. What was the volume yesterday in those contracts?
15. Fifteen fucking contracts.
Hey...what about at $550 strike? 12 contracts.
Liquidity and premium are important. A lot of the time liquidity is the MOST important thing. It doesn't matter what price someone else got if you can't get that price because there isn't a counter-party to trade with.
You can't buy what someone else isn't willing to sell and you can't sell what someone ain't buying.
Yeah but you can't short anything without a margin balance. So for a retail account you need something like $100 in margin balance for every $300 of the short position. You can't open a trading account with zero balance and just start short selling things to raise cash.
He is a retail trader. He's going to have to have a margin balance larger than "almost zero" to put together whatever sort of position you have in mind unless you're just talking about buying far out of the money puts.
Not necessarily. AAPL has been trading differntly since the fall of 2012. Whereas it used to spike on earnings, it now tends to sell of. When using statistical data like this to make actual investment decisions, you should always look at the behaviour for different time frames and see if it stays the same for the most recent intervals.
Very limited growth. Profits are flat. No wonder the stock is down 6%. Apple needs to find more competitive means in both phones and tablets - their market share will continue to erode. They are priced as a growth stock, but they are not growing.
Apple's cash pile is 1/3 of their market cap. That means that is they'd use it to buy their own shares at the current price (they can't, they need to pay taxes on most of it first) their P/E ratio would drop to about 9.
To understand scale: Apple has given $43 Billion to investors since July 2012. Twitter's market cap is $32 Billion. Apple's net profit of $13b over the last 3 months was more than the company made from its founding in 1977 'til the iPhone launched in 2007.
Last night my wife and I were organizing our room, and ended up putting our computers together, and we found three MacBooks (one is really old), two iPads and two iPhones - about $3500 worth of product. The phones are heavily subsidized by our phone bill, the computers are simply "must-haves," and the iPads are our most expensive ($350 ea.) toys. We're one year out of school and make $40,000/year.
Not trying to one-up you, but I have at least a dozen Apple products lying around the house. I've been using them most of my life, so some go a-ways back.
Some are for nostalgia, like an SE, a Portable, a 12" PowerBook and my well-worn first-gen iPhone. My G4 tower was still getting regular use as a file server until pretty recently. Now that we just upgraded to Airs, I have a couple MacBook Pros waiting around for something creative, too. I won't drag on, but I definitely have a hard time letting some of these things go.
I think the poster's point was that he spends a lot of money on apple products, relative to his income. To understand apple's success, one should look at how much money ordinary people with ordinary jobs spend disproportionate money on products they wouldn't otherwise.
There's a graph somewhere of yearly sales figures of various cars vs the cost of those cars. There's a general exponential decline from say the toyota camry, which costs reasonably and sells a lot, to a Bentley, which is the opposite. But there's an irregular data point with the BMW 3-series, because many, many people stretch to afford it. It sells disproportionately well for that reason.
I'm not assigning judgment on how anyone spends their money, just pointing out that there are human reasons for business success and failure.
I make a little more that the parent, but still don't think of Apple products as affordable. It's almost always a stretch for me to purchase them, but I wouldn't be happy with many of the other options.
In the case of my recent upgrade, I justified it as an investment in my future. I don't consider the money I spent on it to be a purchase that I would be comfortable making frequently.
Wether you are a college student of an independent developer, the technology you use affects your success. Apple has a reputation in both industries as being above-average, further demonstrated by the loyalty many users have.
Phones and tablets are very close to the point that desktop/laptops got to a few years back where unless there is some major disruptive technology introduced (eg. batteries with 100%+ efficiency over current ones) on top of them the one you bought this year is pretty much good enough to keep for the next many years, until it breaks somehow.
There will still be a market of ultra-fashion-conscious buyers who really need this years model, just like there are people who lease brand new cars every year, but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far.
Non-replaceable battery is probably a primary why this may not be the case. My iPad 3 seems to be discharging much more quickly these days, and will probably mean a replacement will be needed sometime next year.
Yeah that's a good point I hadn't thought about, and it applies to non-expandable flash ram as well since basically your data will grow to fit available space.
But those issues are sort of cheating since they are basically planned obsolescence features that could trivially be solved if there were any incentive to do so. But there isn't, so more landfill generated for little actual new value.
I meant solved by making the battery replaceable, even if as a service of AppleCare or whatever if not the end-consumer.
See: Teslas, which have to live by the same rules as everyone else when it comes to battery life issues but whose solution isn't 'throw your car out when it won't hold a charge anymore'.
A car is expected to last longer than a laptop, and no-one needs to carry a car around all day in their back pockets. Also note that replacing the entire battery is the only viable way to recharge your Tesla quickly. You can charge your iOS device while you use it.
When Teslas have seen the kind of prolonged use and abuse people's phones and computers have taken, let's see how their battery packs do.
And of course, Apple sells battery replacements at pretty reasonable prices, but most people don't bother because depreciation makes it not worthwhile.
Our kids are using our original iPad 1s and abuse the heck out of them, and they still get decent battery life.
apple is master of planned obsolence. and other are learning later but following close.
battery as you said is almost the norm now.
sd card dissapeared from all android devices save from some expensive sony ones. and with storage prices dropping (ssd just broke the 50c/gb barries) this is a sure way of making next year device much more appealing.
scren resolution being improved in homeopatic doses. year over year. this also contributes to new storage needs as apps space quadriplicate to support all screen sizes, reinforcing point above.
> but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far.
Which is why Apple is pushing so hard into "Developing markets" like China, Brazil, India, etc. etc.
There are hundreds of millions of people on the planet that have never really even had the option of buying an iPhone or iPad. I'll wager tons of them have the means to buy one, and they clearly have the desire.
I don't know... Unless people have specifically been avoiding smart phones/tablets in the expectation that eventually Apple products would become available - I would expect most of them already have devices that are as good, if not better than the iPad/iPhone.
It's not only batteries that have to catch up we're still exceedingly wasteful in other areas. There's tons of potential for display technology to move forward it just comes at the cost of per unit price.
Computers don't need to be screaming away rending this form at 60fps but that's what we're doing at the moment just to make panels as simple as possible.
I don't think that's true. Even without significant software improvements, the iPad could noticeably benefit from a generation or two of faster storage and wireless technologies (both LAN and WAN).
I agree, that's why I said they were close to this point... not quite there yet.
I think faster WAN technologies will end up being gated by our terrible cell carriers though, who are already fucking up widescale LTE and generally doing a bad job of anything other than overcharging for poor service and getting away with it due to massive industry price fixing and collusion.
It's funny. Every year, since 2007 I've heard this argument, that the market isn't big enough and every year: record growth and profits. No but seriously. This year is the year that Apple's iPhone success catches up to them.
"Apple's iPhone business is finally going to fail this year" is the new "this is the year of the Linux desktop"
No one says Apple products are going to fail this year, relax. Most people on earth still don't have a smartphone and so Apple and Samsung will keep on making record revenues and profits until either a better competitor appears or the market gets saturated. Neither will happen any time soon but it's obvious that no market can keep on growing that way for too long.
As for the "this is the year of the Linux desktop", this is the most annoying straw man meme ever. I have yet to meet anyone who ever claimed so except for a couple of articles on cnet or so a few years ago. Linux market share on the desktop worldwide is at 1% which is pretty significant when you think that macs, with all Apple billions are at 5% only. MS has won the desktop war. On mobile however, linux seems to be doing pretty good and so is ios, simply because the market is still growing and there is place for more than one winner. Isn't that great? :)
I think mobile software has a long way to go, and hardware performance will drive quite a bit of upgrading for years to come. Two areas off the top of my head: moving more voice recognition and "smarts" onto the client to speed things up, and better and better gaming.
Non-replaceable naturally create refresh points for mobile devices, in a way they don't even with laptops. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 with a totally dead battery, but it doesn't matter since I most use it at home, where it's easy to keep it plugged in. That doesn't work with a phone or tablet.
In principle this could be true but I don't think it will be. A simply example: right now speech recognition happens in the cloud. Could be that a future device has a dedicated chip for speech recognition (or some kind of preprocessing). Then future versions of the OS will require this. Hence you have to upgrade.
This is how it has gone with things like graphics, animation, even sound. In principle the core elements of the Mac OS don't require extremely fast chips/hardware ... but once you get into the fancy desktop animations, the sound processing, face recognition (e.g. iPhoto), etc etc, you require fancier hardware.
There are still lots of directions for Apple to push their software, directions that will be aided by better and/or more specialized hardware.
If all you need is a text editor, an email client and some CPU power for crunching spreadsheets then for sure, all you "need" is a desktop circa 2000 (or even earlier ...) ... but if you want to run the latest OS, even if you don't need/want all the features of that latest OS, you need to keep up with the hardware.
Something interesting that Apple has been able to do the last few years is find one new technology, or push the notch up on an existing one, such that people feel they're significant enough upgrades that they end up buying whatever it is. What will Apple throw out next? I have no idea, but I'm expecting to be mildly surprised when it happens.
I don't think we're quite there yet with tablets. Maybe another 3-4 years. They are relatively inexpensive and they have a strong hand-me-down life cycle. A lot of people buying new iPads every 1-2 years are doing so to give their old model to kids/family/etc. They are very personal devices no one really wants to share a tablet. There is also going to be more churn in the market because they are very mobile devices more prone to being broken or lost. Being very mobile devices they are more likely to be replaced/upgraded simply due to fashion/social pressure. Best parallel to that is car sales. A lot of people buy new cars simply because they don't want to drive an old/unfashionable car anymore.
SmartPhones are much closer to that 'good enough' point though I think subsidized devices are still very much in impulse buy territory for a lot of people. Given the cost of your cellular contract there's questionable value in saving $100-$200 every two years skipping an upgrade. You have to pay for the service either way it's in your best interest to have a device that can make the most of it. For unsubsidized devices (non-Apple devices at least) there is a healthy low-mid range market developing where the same trends should play out.
Yes, because the ~6 Million iPhones that didn't get bought were because people were freaked out by the NSA. I think it's more likely because the general public weren't that thrilled with where iOS and the iPhone 5C went.
Another great quarter for Apple. Growth in gross margins as well as growth in units in every product line but the iPod. China Mobile sales will end up in next quarter.
The Company sold 51 million iPhones, an all-time quarterly record, compared to 47.8 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 26 million iPads during the quarter, also an all-time quarterly record, compared to 22.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.8 million Macs, compared to 4.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
If I were to play armchair quarterback, I'd say that iPhones are reaching saturation (which, given the 5C, is relatively surprising) and the iPad is where the majority of Apple's growth lies in the coming quarters.
To be contrasted with Android, where they only need to wait a couple of weeks for their brand new phone to be "old". Apple buyers really have a raw deal, getting to enjoy having the latest phone for a whole year.
That's not what I meant. Just as sales of new Mac hardware slow before new devices come out and surge after they do, consumers are becoming more aware of the market with each device they buy. Personally, I went 3G, 3G S, 4, 4S with Nexus 4 and Lumia 920 on the side, and now Nexus 5. I found that the Nexus 4 and Lumia adjusted me to larger screen sizes, and iPhone's doesn't cut it for me right now. I love iOS 7, but I can't carry an iPad mini in my pocket, so until they release in-between sizes (which Asset Catalogs and iOS 7 both will help prepare devs for), I'm avoiding the iPhone until I really think I'll get $600-900 of joy from it. So don't get me wrong, just because I don't use an iPhone doesn't mean I don't want one. I just don't want the specific hardware they offer today, and I suspect I'm not alone.
The trailing revenue number is one I've been watching as well. It shows solid execution but a not a lot of growth. This makes me more curious than ever to hear about this years products. They have had a solid year of flatness, so I don't doubt there is quite a bit of pressure on. Personally I'd like a 12" iPad with a retina screen and a Wacom class stylus with zero lag. Not holding my breath though.
I would agree Apple's current/last-generation iPhone pricing/sizing/models have hit saturation. If they offer a larger iPhone 6 and perhaps push the 5C downmarket to be a competitive unsubsidized device they will sell a ton of iPhones. I suspect we will see new iPhones (much?) earlier than Fall 2014 this time around.
Tim Cook can sandbag the iPhone business all he wants. While they can still bring in a ton of cash from profits, it won't trick wall street into driving their stock price up to a $1000. Maybe that's not his intention.
The reason I recently purchased Apple stock is that I foresee a large number of users coming on board once Apple launches a larger screen size for their iPhone line up. That's the main reason I can't use an iPhone.
As with Microsoft earnings, we will get two reactions:
1) Some people will say the sheer amount of money they are making shows they are not doomed anytime soon
2) Some people will say that making a ton of money now does not mean they will continue to do so in the future, and could still be doomed (if not to bankruptcy than at least irrelevance) in the future.
Both are right. Both will argue the other is wrong.
I'm bearish on Apple. I just don't see the leadership or focus I once saw when Jobs was still at the helm. I think they still might have a few tricks up their sleeve, but I think we're going to see less innovation as the years go on.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI'd say they execute so well it doesn't matter.
Isn't that what Samsung did by coming out with the bigger screened phones? Samsung knew the market was ready for bigger screens when Apple didn't think so, no?
Secondly - Samsung was forced to sell bigger screen phones because they couldn't achieve good battery life with smaller devices.
Not only that, Samsung was more profitable than apple for 2 consecutive quarters in 2013 before newer iPhones were released. Of course ton of other profits of samsung came from non-phones. http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-is-now-a-more-profita...
Second, source on that battery story?
Samsung has defeated all old brands that attempted to survive by adopt android, but is now itself being defeated by cheaper new Chinese brands that can steal its low end share while Apple consumes the high end.
What is the point of mentioning Samsung's temporary high profits from other sources when we are discussing phone strategy?
But any how, what's your source for this statement: Secondly - Samsung was forced to sell bigger screen phones because they couldn't achieve good battery life with smaller devices.
The iPhone numbers missed expectation, and as Apple's main product it didn't look good. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-q1-earnings-2014-1
EPS, Mac and iPad all did well.
Analysts' expectations were not in line with reality. The iPhone numbers are what they are, irrespective of incompetent analysis.
A fairer way to state this would be that analysts, as usual, were over-optimistic and this optimism caused a lot of investors to be overly optimistic too, which caused an over-inflated share price, now corrected.
The price of that uncertainty is what you capture in the options pricing model. aka. "premium"
Two scenarios:
(Short-selling) AAPL: Sell 10 lots (1000 shares) short -> now you OWE someone 1000 shares but have the cash in your account of 1000 shares worth of AAPL stock. The next day, AAPL loses 99% of its value, you buy the shares back at their now 1% value, deliver them to the person you borrowed them from, and keep the rest of the cash in your account. OR, the next day, the shares DOUBLE, and now you owe that person shares that are worth twice as much as you got selling them in the first place. Bad news. Nearly 100% loss on the trade.
(Buying a Put Option) You buy 10 AAPL PUT contracts (100 shares each) "at the money" (strike price equal to the last sale of AAPL) for $XX that expire at some point in the future (lets say one month). Anytime between now and then, if the price of AAPL doubles, your PUT OPTION may most-likely will be worth more than what you paid for it and you can sell it for whatever the market wants to pay for it. If you do nothing, at the end of 30 days, your option is worth exactly ZERO.
The difference in the price movements of the underlying securities in both scenarios is what makes up the premium you pay OVER AND ABOVE what the difference is between what the security trades at and the price you paid for that "option" on the security.
In reality, you "short" a stock by purchasing a Put option. For example, these are made up numbers, but if you thought Apple would tumble on earnings and wanted to short it, you'd buy, say, $525 put options. This is a contract to sell 100 shares of apple at $525. It's worthless if they trade above $525 but if it drops below, you're in the money.
Suppose you pay $150 per contract, and you short 1000 shares -- 10 contracts. The most you can lose is $1500. And if the stock tumbled down to, say, $475, you would make $525-$475 = $50 * 1000 shares = $50,000, or $48,500 profit.
But the most you can ever lose is what you paid for the options.
For one thing, a put (or call) option doesn't even trade on the same markets (usually), has a lot less liquidity (usually), and depends on the supply of people willing to write contracts against positions they already hold. (non-naked) Options also have the effect of limiting any possible loss to the price paid for the option.
When you short a stock, your loss is potentially UNLIMITED. In practice, your broker will buy the stock for you with whatever cash you have on hand if the price moves against you.
That doesn't happen with options but you also don't get the huge sums of money to play with by borrowing against a stock that you don't own but are positive will dive into the dirt.
edit: explanation.
Taking a short position on a security is a strategy.
Buying Puts is a tactic. Short Selling is also a tactic. Both accomplish the same goal of holding a short position -- making money when the price drops.
If you want to take a short position, you can buy Puts. And to wit, if you're a retail investor wanting a short position, this is most often how you'd do it.
Trading the derivitive here is a smarter play for precicely the reason I mentioned: It limits risk. Liquidity on the options market doesn't matter at all because if the price rises, your Puts are worthless anyway. And if it drops, you don't need to sell the contracts, you can execute them (on margin if necessary) and unwind the position that way.
"Going short" a security has a very specific meaning in the equities market. Same with "going long".
And buying puts is NOT the same thing. You've completely forgotten about the concept of premium and time value when pricing an option. For one thing, options are sold at MANY price levels (strike prices) and expiration dates.
Seriously man, with all due respect, you're so mistaken its scary. One of my colleagues designed the NYSE trading network and back-office trade clearing systems. This is how I earn my living. I'll bet you your 401(k) you can't get a floor trader to endorse that explanation you just gave. It's so wrong that I'm only commenting to give other people a chance to learn from your mistake.
Guys like you are how guys like me make money.
Here's the pricing for a put option on AAPL to sell the stock at $450. Expiration 16-Jan-2015 (roughly one year from now):
40.11 Down 3.09(7.15%) Jan 27
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL160115P00450000
That price is per share. So, for roughly $4011, you can buy the right to SELL 100 shares of AAPL between now and Jan-2015 for about one hundred dollars per share LESS than what it's closing price was yesterday. Figuring in the premium, that's about $140 loss per share built into that trade yet there are 1300 OPEN contracts for just that. By your thinking, those puts should be worthless, right?
Moreover, there are already ~1300 OTHER put contracts out there at this exact same strike/expiration. What was the volume yesterday in those contracts?
15. Fifteen fucking contracts.
Hey...what about at $550 strike? 12 contracts.
Liquidity and premium are important. A lot of the time liquidity is the MOST important thing. It doesn't matter what price someone else got if you can't get that price because there isn't a counter-party to trade with.
You can't buy what someone else isn't willing to sell and you can't sell what someone ain't buying.
e.g. short a low beta stock, hedge that position, short the higher beta stock, and hedge that position.
That just sounds like gibberish TBH...
Just buy and hold.
But my point still stands: it's trivial to create a synthetic short position that's dollar neutral.
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Last night my wife and I were organizing our room, and ended up putting our computers together, and we found three MacBooks (one is really old), two iPads and two iPhones - about $3500 worth of product. The phones are heavily subsidized by our phone bill, the computers are simply "must-haves," and the iPads are our most expensive ($350 ea.) toys. We're one year out of school and make $40,000/year.
Some are for nostalgia, like an SE, a Portable, a 12" PowerBook and my well-worn first-gen iPhone. My G4 tower was still getting regular use as a file server until pretty recently. Now that we just upgraded to Airs, I have a couple MacBook Pros waiting around for something creative, too. I won't drag on, but I definitely have a hard time letting some of these things go.
There's a graph somewhere of yearly sales figures of various cars vs the cost of those cars. There's a general exponential decline from say the toyota camry, which costs reasonably and sells a lot, to a Bentley, which is the opposite. But there's an irregular data point with the BMW 3-series, because many, many people stretch to afford it. It sells disproportionately well for that reason.
I'm not assigning judgment on how anyone spends their money, just pointing out that there are human reasons for business success and failure.
In the case of my recent upgrade, I justified it as an investment in my future. I don't consider the money I spent on it to be a purchase that I would be comfortable making frequently.
Wether you are a college student of an independent developer, the technology you use affects your success. Apple has a reputation in both industries as being above-average, further demonstrated by the loyalty many users have.
There will still be a market of ultra-fashion-conscious buyers who really need this years model, just like there are people who lease brand new cars every year, but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far.
But those issues are sort of cheating since they are basically planned obsolescence features that could trivially be solved if there were any incentive to do so. But there isn't, so more landfill generated for little actual new value.
I'm going to guess you're neither a computer hardware nor a battery engineer.
See: Teslas, which have to live by the same rules as everyone else when it comes to battery life issues but whose solution isn't 'throw your car out when it won't hold a charge anymore'.
http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html
When Teslas have seen the kind of prolonged use and abuse people's phones and computers have taken, let's see how their battery packs do.
And of course, Apple sells battery replacements at pretty reasonable prices, but most people don't bother because depreciation makes it not worthwhile.
Our kids are using our original iPad 1s and abuse the heck out of them, and they still get decent battery life.
battery as you said is almost the norm now.
sd card dissapeared from all android devices save from some expensive sony ones. and with storage prices dropping (ssd just broke the 50c/gb barries) this is a sure way of making next year device much more appealing.
scren resolution being improved in homeopatic doses. year over year. this also contributes to new storage needs as apps space quadriplicate to support all screen sizes, reinforcing point above.
Which is why Apple is pushing so hard into "Developing markets" like China, Brazil, India, etc. etc.
There are hundreds of millions of people on the planet that have never really even had the option of buying an iPhone or iPad. I'll wager tons of them have the means to buy one, and they clearly have the desire.
Computers don't need to be screaming away rending this form at 60fps but that's what we're doing at the moment just to make panels as simple as possible.
I think faster WAN technologies will end up being gated by our terrible cell carriers though, who are already fucking up widescale LTE and generally doing a bad job of anything other than overcharging for poor service and getting away with it due to massive industry price fixing and collusion.
"Apple's iPhone business is finally going to fail this year" is the new "this is the year of the Linux desktop"
This latest quarter, revenue has grown 5.7% and income per diluted share 5.0%. This could actually be the end of limitless growth.
As for the "this is the year of the Linux desktop", this is the most annoying straw man meme ever. I have yet to meet anyone who ever claimed so except for a couple of articles on cnet or so a few years ago. Linux market share on the desktop worldwide is at 1% which is pretty significant when you think that macs, with all Apple billions are at 5% only. MS has won the desktop war. On mobile however, linux seems to be doing pretty good and so is ios, simply because the market is still growing and there is place for more than one winner. Isn't that great? :)
Non-replaceable naturally create refresh points for mobile devices, in a way they don't even with laptops. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 with a totally dead battery, but it doesn't matter since I most use it at home, where it's easy to keep it plugged in. That doesn't work with a phone or tablet.
This is how it has gone with things like graphics, animation, even sound. In principle the core elements of the Mac OS don't require extremely fast chips/hardware ... but once you get into the fancy desktop animations, the sound processing, face recognition (e.g. iPhoto), etc etc, you require fancier hardware.
There are still lots of directions for Apple to push their software, directions that will be aided by better and/or more specialized hardware.
If all you need is a text editor, an email client and some CPU power for crunching spreadsheets then for sure, all you "need" is a desktop circa 2000 (or even earlier ...) ... but if you want to run the latest OS, even if you don't need/want all the features of that latest OS, you need to keep up with the hardware.
Never mind games.
SmartPhones are much closer to that 'good enough' point though I think subsidized devices are still very much in impulse buy territory for a lot of people. Given the cost of your cellular contract there's questionable value in saving $100-$200 every two years skipping an upgrade. You have to pay for the service either way it's in your best interest to have a device that can make the most of it. For unsubsidized devices (non-Apple devices at least) there is a healthy low-mid range market developing where the same trends should play out.
The Company sold 51 million iPhones, an all-time quarterly record, compared to 47.8 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 26 million iPads during the quarter, also an all-time quarterly record, compared to 22.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.8 million Macs, compared to 4.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
If I were to play armchair quarterback, I'd say that iPhones are reaching saturation (which, given the 5C, is relatively surprising) and the iPad is where the majority of Apple's growth lies in the coming quarters.
EDIT: Apple's trailing twelve-month revenue (credit to Benedict Evans): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BfBIdoYCEAAzNqI.jpg:large
I would agree Apple's current/last-generation iPhone pricing/sizing/models have hit saturation. If they offer a larger iPhone 6 and perhaps push the 5C downmarket to be a competitive unsubsidized device they will sell a ton of iPhones. I suspect we will see new iPhones (much?) earlier than Fall 2014 this time around.
The reason I recently purchased Apple stock is that I foresee a large number of users coming on board once Apple launches a larger screen size for their iPhone line up. That's the main reason I can't use an iPhone.
1) Some people will say the sheer amount of money they are making shows they are not doomed anytime soon
2) Some people will say that making a ton of money now does not mean they will continue to do so in the future, and could still be doomed (if not to bankruptcy than at least irrelevance) in the future.
Both are right. Both will argue the other is wrong.