Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 2:50:12 GMT -8
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 2:57:02 GMT -8
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 3:03:29 GMT -8
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 3:16:59 GMT -8
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 3:34:27 GMT -8
I just received this email from Netflix:
Like most, I will pay the increased price, but as the price continues to increase through the years I’m guessing that many will have to say “enough”. Apple is smart to continue its free trial. It’s hard to beat free.
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 3:45:29 GMT -8
I just received this email from Netflix: Like most, I will pay the increased price, but as the price continues to increase through the years I’m guessing that many will have to say “enough”. Apple is smart to continue its free trial. It’s hard to beat free. I was just thinking that maybe Apple could continue with a free AppleTV+, but present one Apple product ad each month displaying Apple product. Apple makes some of the best ads out there. Or provide an Apple store App to provide easy access to the Apple store. Just a thought.
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chinacat
Moderator
AAPL Long since 2006
Posts: 4,426
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Post by chinacat on Feb 2, 2021 6:21:39 GMT -8
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ono
Member
compensation
Posts: 537
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Post by ono on Feb 2, 2021 7:18:23 GMT -8
FW: Consumer Reports guy interviewed re MacBook Air M1... ... So, it was almost kind of a struggle to write about it because I didn't want to be too effusive in my praise.
But this M1 MacBook Air. I was like, man, I really do not see anything wrong. It's hard to criticize it. I was honestly kind of struggling to write about it. Cause it's like, I can't say this thing is perfect. You know, you can't say that. But it is really good. The keyboard is amazing. The screen is fine. It is faster, ...the biggest sort of knock I could give is the webcam. It's not good appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/02/exclusive-consumer-reports-nicholas-de-leon-on-m1-versus-intelNicholas De Leon: Honestly, I was very, very impressed with it. it's interesting, now the way Consumer Reports works. I'm trying to be objective. I don't want to be a fan boy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. That's fun too, whatever. But we are trying to be sort of middle of the road and just look at the facts, just the facts, ma'am, that type of thing. So it was almost kind of a struggle to write about it because I didn't want to be too effusive in my praise. I was like, this is a really good laptop man. Apple sort of has that reputation where it's like the first version of a product is maybe not the best. Like the first Apple Watch was, eh, it was okay. I guess, but like the second one, I feel like they knocked it out of the park. But this M1 MacBook Air. I was like, man, I really do not see anything wrong. It's hard to criticize it. I was honestly kind of struggling to write about it. Cause it's like, I can't say this thing is perfect. You know, you can't say that. But it is really good. The keyboard is amazing. The screen is fine. It is faster, especially given our audience, you know, again, we're not Engadget, we're not some of the more enthusiasts crowd. We're not speaking to those folks. We're talking to regular folks out there and if you're a regular person and you're using Microsoft Word or Chrome or Safari or things like that where you're really not even getting into, "why do I need a quad core, eight core processor?" This is kind of lost on a lot of folks. And so to me, the biggest sort of knock I could give is the webcam. It's not good, and that's not a breaking news and we've known that for Apple, for whatever reason, they didn't prioritize the web cam in the past, and this is how quickly context changes.
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chinacat
Moderator
AAPL Long since 2006
Posts: 4,426
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Post by chinacat on Feb 2, 2021 7:41:47 GMT -8
FW: Consumer Reports guy interviewed re MacBook Air That was like a really good like review, like maybe the best that I have like read. I think he liked it
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mark
fire starter
Posts: 1,552
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Post by mark on Feb 2, 2021 11:30:32 GMT -8
For a couple of months now I've been champing at the bit to buy an M1-based machine (probably the 13" pro because I'm a pro kind of guy ... despite not really needing all that power most of the time) but I really want a 15-16" pro model. So I'm waiting. Not sure how long I can hold out.
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 12:52:06 GMT -8
For a couple of months now I've been champing at the bit to buy an M1-based machine (probably the 13" pro because I'm a pro kind of guy ... despite not really needing all that power most of the time) but I really want a 15-16" pro model. So I'm waiting. Not sure how long I can hold out. I understand. A Mac Mini keeps calling my name. I’ve started running out of excuses.
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Post by archibaldtuttle on Feb 2, 2021 13:11:45 GMT -8
GOOGL beats earnings expectations by 40%, up 8% after hours AMZN also has a big beat, but announces that Bezos is stepping back as CEO, stock up a little
(AAPL beats last week by 20%, CEO stays in place, stock down a lot)
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JDSoCal
Member
Aspiring oligarch
Posts: 4,182
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Post by JDSoCal on Feb 2, 2021 13:45:11 GMT -8
Hard to imagine Apple hired this guy to design iPhones.
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Post by Lstream on Feb 2, 2021 13:46:26 GMT -8
GOOGL beats earnings expectations by 40%, up 8% after hours AMZN also has a big beat, but announces that Bezos is stepping back as CEO, stock up a little (AAPL beats last week by 20%, CEO stays in place, stock down a lot) You are a constant ray of sunshine
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Post by Lstream on Feb 2, 2021 13:52:19 GMT -8
Hard to imagine Apple hired this guy to design iPhones. Maybe Apple wants to have better iPhone mounts in these premium German brands. Instead of using cupholders or mounts that rattle and have other problems. Seriously, this is intriguing and I really like his pedigree, in spite of working on SUV's.
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Post by archibaldtuttle on Feb 2, 2021 15:00:47 GMT -8
GOOGL beats earnings expectations by 40%, up 8% after hours AMZN also has a big beat, but announces that Bezos is stepping back as CEO, stock up a little (AAPL beats last week by 20%, CEO stays in place, stock down a lot) You are a constant ray of sunshine If I can't grumble here, where can I grumble?
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Post by Lstream on Feb 2, 2021 15:01:44 GMT -8
I know this is off-topic, but I am blown away by some of the stuff I just read. Let's say you lost 90% of your common sense and thinking ability overnight. And you felt like joining a community that made you feel like a genius. Head over to WallStreetBets on Reddit and sign up. Jesus H. Christ on the proudly displayed stupidity.
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 15:14:50 GMT -8
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Dave
Member
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,096
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Post by Dave on Feb 2, 2021 15:22:34 GMT -8
GOOGL beats earnings expectations by 40%, up 8% after hours AMZN also has a big beat, but announces that Bezos is stepping back as CEO, stock up a little (AAPL beats last week by 20%, CEO stays in place, stock down a lot) The end of the Bezos era at AmazonI’m sorry, but every time I see a picture of Jeff Bezos I can’t keep from thinking of the villain in Austin Powers, Dr. Evil.
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Post by Luckychoices on Feb 2, 2021 15:54:54 GMT -8
I hate to keep picking on the author of the Seeking Alpha titled, "Apple Is A Sell"...I just don't hate it enough to stop doing it. He is, however, just one of many who got it so wrong about AAPL. This is his article's summary about Apple's future. Note that he uses the phrase, "could disappoint" twice, just in his short summary. Weasel words, IMO. ================ Apple Is A Sell by Fishtown Capital, Nov. 24, 2020 1:37 PM ET Summary After tripling since early 2019, I think Apple shares now have more downside than upside. The categories of iPad, Mac, Wearables, Home and Accessories beat expectations in the past quarter, but could disappoint in future quarters. Share repurchases that have driven EPS gains in the past few years will have less of an impact going forward because of the current high valuation. Expectations for FY21 and the current 5G iPhone upgrade cycle are already high and could disappoint.================ On Dec 1 and Jan 22, Bradmeister, an AAPL Long who frequently comments on SA, had a couple of reminders for the author: Then, on earnings day, 01/27/21, a same-day, snide comment from a less than sympathetic reader: And now, even though AAPL has pulled back a little because of the GME situation, the author hears, yet again, about his failure to get it right about Apple. Obviously, Seeking Alpha authors must have very strong convictions before writing a negative article about the future prospects of Apple/AAPL because they will certainly hear from both long and short-term AAPL investors when their prognostication so quickly turns out to be incorrect. 😊 Cheers to the AAPL Longs!!
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4aapl
Moderator
Posts: 3,625
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Post by 4aapl on Feb 2, 2021 16:02:54 GMT -8
I know this is off-topic, but I am blown away by some of the stuff I just read. Let's say you lost 90% of your common sense and thinking ability overnight. And you felt like joining a community that made you feel like a genius. Head over to WallStreetBets on Reddit and sign up. Jesus H. Christ on the proudly displayed stupidity. Any specific examples? It sounds like it gets so much traffic (I think the article said 99k posts a day) that it must be hard to separate it out, and I seem to remember a couple days ago articles talking about 6M subscribers, but now talking about 8M subscribers. Dealing with that huge of group, and one where anyone who quickly made money (even if they did or did not quickly loose it), I'm sure there are a lot who think they are hot stuff. But like various various funds out there, half are going to beat the median each year. The real question is how they do over time, over multiple investments. Maybe WallStreetBets finds a winning strategy that works consistently for a while. Or maybe they are more of a one hit wonder. I'd imagine there is part of the group that has more of a clue, and will have to break off if they want to continue.
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JDSoCal
Member
Aspiring oligarch
Posts: 4,182
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Post by JDSoCal on Feb 2, 2021 16:05:18 GMT -8
Hard to imagine Apple hired this guy to design iPhones. Maybe Apple wants to have better iPhone mounts in these premium German brands. Instead of using cupholders or mounts that rattle and have other problems. Seriously, this is intriguing and I really like his pedigree, in spite of working on SUV's. Well, the way I see it, a VW is a VW.
Just so long as the P/E expands, I don't care what Apple poops out.
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Post by Lstream on Feb 2, 2021 16:19:13 GMT -8
I know this is off-topic, but I am blown away by some of the stuff I just read. Let's say you lost 90% of your common sense and thinking ability overnight. And you felt like joining a community that made you feel like a genius. Head over to WallStreetBets on Reddit and sign up. Jesus H. Christ on the proudly displayed stupidity. Any specific examples? It sounds like it gets so much traffic (I think the article said 99k posts a day) that it must be hard to separate it out, and I seem to remember a couple days ago articles talking about 6M subscribers, but now talking about 8M subscribers. Dealing with that huge of group, and one where anyone who quickly made money (even if they did or did not quickly loose it), I'm sure there are a lot who think they are hot stuff. But like various various funds out there, half are going to beat the median each year. The real question is how they do over time, over multiple investments. Maybe WallStreetBets finds a winning strategy that works consistently for a while. Or maybe they are more of a one hit wonder. I'd imagine there is part of the group that has more of a clue, and will have to break off if they want to continue. Some guy with a $150K 401k. Because YOLO, he tossed it all into GME. He has a third of it left, and is posting as if he is proud of it. He has a screen shot of his account showing the carnage. A pile of people like that saying they haven’t lost anything, because they have not sold yet. Madness of crowds on full display over there.
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4aapl
Moderator
Posts: 3,625
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Post by 4aapl on Feb 2, 2021 17:00:20 GMT -8
]Some guy with a $150K 401k. Because YOLO, he tossed it all into GME. He has a third of it left, and is posting as if he is proud of it. He has a screen shot of his account showing the carnage. A pile of people like that saying they haven’t lost anything, because they have not sold yet. Madness of crowds on full display over there. Mark Cuban said today he would continue holding. Or rather, he really said that if you had the conviction to go into it thinking it was a good investment to make, he would keep on holding it and not let these ups and downs toss you out, especially if some of the downs might be due to limits on buying through RobinHood and the like. finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-cuban-tells-wallstreetbets-hold-173347985.htmlOTOH, he also said to learn from your mistakes. Like growing up in general, it's better to make mistakes and learn from them when the consequences are small. If $150k was the 401k value a year ago and he lost 2/3rds of it just this one time, that's a big difference from it maybe being $3k a year ago, and making multiple riskier (judgement call) investment choices he worked it up to $150k, only to have it quickly deflate to $50k. That would be a whole different lesson, still with wishful thinking, but also with not as much total downfall and even a net gain. (FWIW, that's probably how my learning experience of '98-'01 went, building maybe $50-80k up to $451k, then back down to maybe $60-90k. That's a lot better than loosing it all, and it was big enough relative numbers at the time to teach me a thing or two. But it also left a few shares, part of what morphed into what we have now. OTOH, I was putting at least $5k/year into a 401k as a safety net, and at the depths of 2007 I converted that into a Roth, paying taxes on something around $100k, which has now turned into much more than a safety net due to also being in AAPL) I think we got notices across three brokerages that margin requirements were changing on GME. But, I remember the same one AAPL, after it started falling in '00, and when I was getting squeezed. It might have been from having a concentrated portfolio even then, but I think it might have been due to it being considered a riskier stock, which is was at that time. Oh well. It's like watching my kids grow up, and trying to give some advice so that they don't hit all of the particular problems we hit. But so many things you just have to experience for yourself to learn from. I wish the group from WallStreetBets the best, in that whether they profit or lose from this particular "investment" choice, that they learn from it.
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Post by silkstone on Feb 2, 2021 17:57:13 GMT -8
Apple Just Sold $14 Billion in Bonds to Buy Back Stock. What It Means for Investors.
Even though Apple stock is trading at record highs, selling bonds could be a smart move. Apple just sold $14 billion of bonds, and plans to send part of the proceeds to its shareholders. Investors may wonder why now, given the company’s giant cash reserve and a stock near record highs. But a more appropriate question might be: Why not?
On Monday, the technology giant priced a bond sale across six maturities, spanning from five to 40 years. In a prospectus, Apple (ticker: AAPL) said it might use part of the proceeds to buy back shares or pay dividends. That could give investors pause, for a couple of reasons. First, shares trade near all-time highs, after gaining 75% over the past 12 months; normally, companies are expected to start buybacks when shares are cheap. Apple is now trading at 30 times next year’s forecast earnings, above its historical average of 24, according to FactSet.
Second, about 45% of the new bonds were sold with maturities between 20 to 40 years, even though long-dated corporate bonds like Apple’s could experience losses as long-term Treasury yields climb. CreditSights has an Underperform rating only on the company’s long-term debt, citing concerns about regulatory risk in coming decades.
Yet Monday’s sale was met by fairly strong demand, receiving more than $2 worth of bids for every $1 sold, according to Bloomberg. That was a decent showing, if not quite a blowout. And with further investigation, the logic behind the sale starts making sense for investors—and even more so for the company.
The most important factor for Apple could be that long-term Treasury yields are expected to keep rising, so the company might want to borrow for decades at low costs while it is still possible. The bonds were sold with coupons between 0.7% (for the 5-year note) and 2.8% (for the 40-year bond).
Investors also know that the size of the offering—$14 billion—is relatively small compared to Apple’s cash hoard. The company had a total $196 billion of cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet as of Dec. 26, with $36 billion of that in cash and $41 billion in short-term securities.
Some of the proceeds from the bond sale will likely be used to refinance short-term debt, analysts from CreditSights argued in a Monday note. Apple has $7.75 billion of bonds maturing this year, the firm said. While short-term rates remain near zero, companies can reduce pressure on their balance sheets by extending the maturities of debt.
Spending some of the cash on buybacks and dividends might not be counterintuitive, either. The run-up in the company’s stock has been supported by the company’s fourth-quarter report of record revenue, and Apple executives have long discussed plans to run down the company’s cash balance and return that capital to shareholders.
Still, market conditions are slightly less ripe for such a move than they were last year. In August, Apple sold five-year bonds with coupons of 0.55%, slightly lower than its dividend yield at the time, meaning it could have effectively saved cash by buying back stock with the proceeds. This time around, Apple’s five-year bonds came with a yield of 0.7%, above its dividend yield of 0.6%.
Still, with low Treasury yields and heaps of investor cash getting funneled into investment-grade bond funds, investors are likely to welcome strong issuers when they can. Write to Alexandra Scaggs at alexandra.scaggs@barrons.com
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Post by Lstream on Feb 2, 2021 17:57:25 GMT -8
Well I guess we think differently. Under no condition do I believe that throwing 100% of your 401k into a clear mania is anything but stupid. No matter how that $150K came to be.
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Post by silkstone on Feb 2, 2021 18:07:08 GMT -8
Well I guess we think differently. Under no condition do I believe that throwing 100% of your 401k into a clear mania is anything but stupid. No matter how that $150K came to be. It’s a good strategy if you want to work your entire adult life.
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4aapl
Moderator
Posts: 3,625
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Post by 4aapl on Feb 2, 2021 18:19:28 GMT -8
Well I guess we think differently. Under no condition do I believe that throwing 100% of your 401k into a clear mania is anything but stupid. No matter how that $150K came to be. It is the opposite of what I did, where I used the 401k as a safety net and backstop, which let me be more aggressive in my normal account. OTOH, there are benefits of doing anything that has capital gains, short or long, in a tax advantaged account. But what I was saying is that if this person was only a year or two into putting money into a 401k, and had built up that 150k quickly by being aggressive, then losing 66% of it (so far) can be seen a bit differently. If it was 5k a year ago, he made a different trade that doubled it to 10k, and then that 150k was due to the crazy 1500% that GME had just in January, then "only" having 50k now is still a crazy and unsustainable 1000% of what the value was a year ago. It's a whole different story if the investor had put in 3k per year, and with appreciation over 20 years had slowly built it to a lofty 120k. Put it all in GME, topped out at 150k, and then it quickly lost a leading digit to make it 50k. With that crowd, based on what little I know about them but also the variety of people I have heard from recently and in the past decade that "discover" something they think can make them rich quickly, I don't think that second story is the actual one. But 5 or 10k to 150k to 50k, especially for someone just starting out though with the ability to put 5 or 10k aside. Well, it's a whole different story than someone in their 50's betting it all on black.
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benoir
fire starter
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Posts: 1,318
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Post by benoir on Feb 2, 2021 18:28:22 GMT -8
holy crap GOOGL'S done a mini GME in the after-hours...
I guess I we can't complain. AAPL did a GME in the last year...
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benoir
fire starter
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Posts: 1,318
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Post by benoir on Feb 2, 2021 18:33:34 GMT -8
Apple Just Sold $14 Billion in Bonds to Buy Back Stock. What It Means for Investors.
fun fact@ $135 share price, $14B represents 100million shares (thereabouts...)
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