by that logic, AAPL was a bad buy at ~$70 in 2007.

2/14/2012 11:47:06 PM

Yeah, I bought high in 2007. My only regret is not buying high more often.

It's not often you find a cheap, high growth, high profit company with relatively low risk that everyone knows about that makes a real product that its large, varied, growing, global customer base loves. in a motherfucking recession

Every time I have tried some cockamamie trading scheme, I've never outperformed AAPL. Thus, every investment decision boils down to whether it's worth the effort to try some bullshit to beat a 500% in 5 years increase.



[Edited on February 15, 2012 at 12:35 AM. Reason : .]

2/15/2012 12:28:59 AM

ok, im mostly risk off as of right now... the stuff im hearing on CNBC's halftime report is convicing me to do so

2/15/2012 1:01:00 PM

WELLI'LLBEAMONKEY'SUNCLE

2/16/2012 1:16:59 PM

Moved out of equities and 100% in to bonds. expecting a pullback

2/21/2012 7:04:09 AM

CSCO up ~30ish% in the past 6 months. Not bad. Of course it is down 25% over the past 5 years, so...

Looks like a relatively cyclical stock over the past ~10 years and is on an upswing right now.

2/21/2012 11:47:53 AM

Quote :

"CSCO up ~30ish% in the past 6 months. Not bad. Of course it is down 25% over the past 5 years, so... "

I've been watching that as well. Usually when it gets close to my target selling point I'll hold it up until the next earnings report is due and sell the day of. This time earnings were expected to be decent so I held it through the report. I'd like to see it get to $22 or so before I sell, but if it goes over $21 and doesn't seem to be moving any more I'll go ahead and take a little profit (10-15%) and wait for it to drop again.

2/21/2012 12:17:17 PM

Gold is on fire this year . $50 in the last two days. $5,000 not looking so unlikely now is it

2/22/2012 3:57:49 PM

Closed another synthetic long on BAC, this one at $7 and going out to Jan 2014.

1/27 bought Jan 7 calls at 2.14 each and sold Jan 7 puts at 1.85
2/22 sold Jan 7 calls at 2.60 each and bought Jan 7 puts at 1.59

made .72 per share on a .29 per share investment

2/22/2012 3:59:28 PM

I used to be so skeptical about options, but damn if it they aren't the money maker in my portfolio

VPRT before the $8ish jump and PEP last fall

Now to find something new

2/22/2012 8:25:54 PM

The market is merely pausing to work off the overbought conditions. A couple months from now everyone is going to be talking about how this will be the most hated low volume rally ever. It's going to take awhile to suck all those people in off the sidelines into this thing and once it looks like the coast really is clear is when the shit will hit the fan again.

2/23/2012 5:34:43 PM

Bought SHLD at $62 on Thursday just after it shot up on earnings. Immediately sold $62.5 calls that expire this Friday for $2.5 to pocket a 5% return in 8 days.

It's hanging out around $69 right now so I imagine it will be called away.

2/27/2012 3:40:06 PM

Stock is up 131% in less than 2 months. 87% institutionally owned. Lulz.

2/27/2012 5:29:08 PM

AAPL up to almost $550.

If this ever crashes it is going to be epic.

2/29/2012 10:37:33 AM

the crazy thing is that even with the ~$175/share runup since october, the P/E is only 15. it's not like 99-00 when Cisco, Intel, etc, commanded triple digit P/E ratios when they ran up with reckless abandon.

Even if AAPL reported a decrease in earnings growth, that would still justify _current_ pricing.

2/29/2012 2:06:46 PM

Yeah its not really overpriced if they could maintain current earnings. Just might be difficult to do that

2/29/2012 7:11:59 PM

Quote :

"How's my Apple short recommendation looking? Best call of 2011 in this thread I bet"

message_topic.aspx?topic=606738&page=9#14819197

3/1/2012 2:43:09 PM

haha. to be fair that trade would've made money.

But the uptick in apple is amazing.

Saw a guy on CNBC today that had a target price of $270 for Apple.

I'm not much of a tech guy but his reasoning is that a giant shift is taking place for web apps and that it's passing Apple by. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with him (I dont know enough about it to opine) but it was certainly an interesting opinion especially on a tout network like CNBC.

It just seems to me that the stock is so widely owned that not that many more funds and investors can chance buying more of it. Again, I never argued that the company isn't great I'm just a strong believer in Porter's Five Forces.

Apple has done a great job (i bought the stock at 100 in 2008 but sold around 200 in 2009 i believe, maybe 2010 i forget.) thus far but it's simply improbable that they can continue to maintain these margins when other products that are open source like Droid are beginning to leave them in the dust as far as product features. I definitely underestimated the demand for tablets but that too will face challengers and I have to beleive it will continue to cannibalize macs and ipods are pretty much a dead dog already.

The cash on the balance sheet also presents a big drag on future stock returns and downside potential if they start pulling a google or start acquiring people at bad valuations.

The market on a stock like this can definitely become irrational so who knows where the stock will go in the short term, but if you are buying it today with the intention of holding it 15 years I don't like its prospects all that much. Tech is just too unpredictable for one company to maintain those type of earnings. Look at microsoft, they are just now getting back in business after 15 relatively lousy years.

3/2/2012 6:54:49 PM

Quote :

"other products that are open source like Droid are beginning to leave them in the dust as far as product features. I definitely underestimated the demand for tablets but that too will face challengers and I have to beleive it will continue to cannibalize macs and ipods are pretty much a dead dog already."

There is so much misinformation here it's astounding. Practically everything you said is just straight up incorrect.

[Edited on March 3, 2012 at 2:54 AM. Reason : To be fair, you did say you're not a tech guy. But believe me, it shows.]

3/3/2012 2:53:34 AM

No, that statement was more fact than opinion

3/3/2012 12:52:28 PM

I thought facts were supposed to be true though.

Hmm...

3/3/2012 6:56:30 PM

My Roth has been 100% in long-term treasuries for 12 months now. It's been a completely headache-free year, and I'm up more than 30%.

Thank you, European debt crisis.

With a fed guarantee that interest rates will stay low, crap going on around the world, and more deflationary debt-deleveraging still to come, I'm going to stick right where I am.

3/3/2012 10:07:13 PM

Quote :

"haha. to be fair that trade would've made money."

Yeah, if you'd set your trailing stops right you could have made a whopping $6 on pure luck. However, you were beyond adamant that AAPL was heading to $200 so imagine that you'd would have sat on it until who knows when.

3/4/2012 5:08:08 AM

Quote :

"My Roth has been 100% in long-term treasuries for 12 months now. It's been a completely headache-free year, and I'm up more than 30%. "

I call Shenanigans.

3/4/2012 8:45:32 AM

http://www.google.com/finance?cid=7766358

3/4/2012 9:12:09 AM

I'm pretty sure it fell like $30 not $6

3/4/2012 9:32:51 AM

Go check and tell us what your return would have been with a 1% trailing stop.

3/4/2012 11:22:35 AM

Quote :

"I'm not much of a tech guy but his reasoning is that a giant shift is taking place for web apps and that it's passing Apple by... Apple has done a great job (i bought the stock at 100 in 2008 but sold around 200 in 2009 i believe, maybe 2010 i forget.) thus far but it's simply improbable that they can continue to maintain these margins when other products that are open source like Droid are beginning to leave them in the dust as far as product features. I definitely underestimated the demand for tablets but that too will face challengers and I have to beleive it will continue to cannibalize macs and ipods are pretty much a dead dog already. "

Quote :

"No, that statement was more fact than opinion"

The problem is product features are almost a pejorative today. The best example being an enterprise app that ends up having 1000 features for a bullet point list a sales person can use to sell to an executive (a lot of time who doesn't use the product). Contrast that with a product that is focused on doing 1 or 2 things perfectly well. The trend in most software companies is to now have focus and build products that do things very well rather than try to cram in the kitchen sink.

Apple has lots of web apps, they just run natively. They have a whole strategy that competes directly with Amazon and Dropbox as well as many other web app companies. The question is whether or not the products fulfill the need and customers end up buying it.

3/5/2012 1:45:16 PM

RIMM: still going down the tubes.

3/5/2012 2:00:17 PM

MSFT should buy them & proceed to own the corporate user market forever.

..selloff came a lot later than i thought, but alas its here

3/6/2012 1:43:34 PM

any inputs on yelp?

3/6/2012 2:39:51 PM

Re: Yelp, I asked a friend who follows tech companies and said:

"I think the space has a lot of value. “Local” is as big as “mobile”. YellowPages (yp.com) makes a ridiculous amount of money in this space right now. Yelp is the only serious competition to YP online, besides perhaps Google Places, and maybe Facebook/Bing/Yahoo to a lesser extent.

Yelp has proven they can sell (extremely overpriced [1]) ads to businesses, and get people to put the little sticker in the window. Definitely not easy. They’re one of a few brands that are well known. A few others are Groupon, LivingSocial, Zagats (Google), Google Places, YP.com, Facebook kinda.

Regarding the opportunity, I think a couple of things are true:
1) Half of the total advertising spend in the US comes from local businesses
2) Local businesses are terribly underrepresented in online advertising (they buy phone book ads, they buy TV ads, they buy newspaper ads. They don’t buy AdWords)
3) One day they will “get it” and start buying online ads. A lot of people will get rich.

The questions are:

1) How much, if any, of the local online advertising market will Yelp get?
2) How long is this going to take to happen?

I think its already happening, but will take a couple more years to really get going (3-5). But I think Yelp is as well positioned as anyone to make a move when the next big opportunity comes up (like TravelZoo getting into daily deals). I don’t think we’ve seen The Next Big Thing in local yet though.

Final thought: Google went almost all the way with Yelp and then “left them at the altar”. Later they just competed with them directly with Google Places. Dunno what to take from that."

My opinion from a stock perspective, is to let the market correct itself. Its exposed to systematic risk right now from Greece, Iran, etc. Its hard to judge its fundamentals right now. I think it will settle around $25, and is at $20.50 right now

3/7/2012 8:03:51 AM

thanks

3/7/2012 9:39:47 AM

Quote :

"Every investment decision is a decision of whether or not to buy AAPL."

buy low & sell high =/= buy at all time high

Quote :

"by that logic, AAPL was a bad buy at ~$70 in 2007. - bobbydigital"

If you'd like to take the comment out of context that is your decision, buying AAPL in '07 @ 70 vs $535 in 2012 are 2 completely different scenarios. There is no way in hell Apple will grow as fast in the next 5 yrs as it has in the last 5.

3/7/2012 11:46:56 PM

At this current time, does anyone think it is worth throwing $1000 into Lehman Bros at $0.03 a share?

3/9/2012 12:10:58 PM

I would not take an equity position in a firm that is being liquidated.

3/9/2012 1:11:27 PM

There's almost never any equity left over when a financial firm goes bust because their assets are liquidated at firesale prices.

Considering they were leveraged at 30:1 I'd say there's a 99.999% chance that's the case.

What has their board of directors estimated their equity to be worth after the liquidation?

3/11/2012 12:26:17 AM

Where could I go about finding that out?



I got to believe that the company will not completely disappear. They have got to turn some kind of profit at some point in the (distant) future. Right?

3/12/2012 11:14:54 AM

lehman only exists as a vehicle to liquidate assets and distribute the proceeds to debt holders. They do not have ongoing operations and only generate income by selling assets. Once all the assets are sold, there will be no Lehman. Barclays and others purchased bits and pieces of the company after bankruptcy.

3/12/2012 12:45:36 PM

Quote :

"If you'd like to take the comment out of context that is your decision, buying AAPL in '07 @ 70 vs $535 in 2012 are 2 completely different scenarios. There is no way in hell Apple will grow as fast in the next 5 yrs as it has in the last 5."

I didn't claim you'd have a 5-bagger on your hands at today's prices.

P/E on September 30th 2007 was 39.05 at a price of 154.63
P/E today is 15.68 with a price of ~$550.

The price has more than tripled in 5 years and the P/E is less than half of what it was. This means that Apple's earnings have accelerated much faster than it's market cap. The price runup over the last few years should definitely raise alarms based on historical runups of other tech giants that ultimately deflated. The difference here is that aapl is more reasonably priced against it's earnings now than it was 5 years ago.

3/12/2012 1:21:03 PM

Quote :

"Once all the assets are sold, there will be no Lehman. Barclays and others purchased bits and pieces of the company after bankruptcy."

I just figured this out. My bad on the dumb question.


What assets would that have to liquidate at this point? Office furniture and computers?

[Edited on March 12, 2012 at 2:34 PM. Reason : qq]

3/12/2012 2:34:37 PM

and binder clips.

millions of binder clips.

3/12/2012 2:47:53 PM

I found 112 Lehman Brothers items on ebay.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=lehman+brothers

3/12/2012 2:53:55 PM

Heh. HOWARD JOHNSONS *Rare* "Lehman Brothers endorsed" Stock Certificate 100 Shares US $69.00

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HOWARD-JOHNSONS-Rare-Lehman-Brothers-endorsed-Stock-Certificate-100-Shares-/260973888333?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cc341834d#ht_557wt_1396

3/12/2012 2:56:27 PM

In addition to hard assets like real estate, they have other loans and long positions in bonds, securitizations, cdos, et cetera. In banking, loans are considered assets and deposits are considered liabilities.

3/12/2012 3:28:08 PM

Right they have financial assets. Pieces of paper that are probably mostly still underwater.

Say they wanted to sell $20 million worth of an illiquid security. If they do it all at once the asset will plunge in price and the people who own Lehman debt will scream foul as they are the ones who ultimately get hosed.

Therefore they have to sell the assets in an orderly fashion. As these assets get closer to maturity or the underlying companies become less risky, liquidity will return to the markets and they can liquidate these assets at better prices, offering the Lehman debt holders more of their money back.

IF Lehman were able to ultimately be able to give their debt holders 100 cents on the dollar for their bonds, whatever is leftover would be returned to the equity holders.

Again, the firm was leveraged at 30:1. In Layman's terms (sorry i had to) that means if their assets plunged ~3% their firm was rendered insolvent.

It's pretty safe to say the total losses will be greater than 3%. Buying their stock at $0.03 is really like buying a far out of the money call on a stock. You are putting up a super small amount of money with hopes that the assets are ultimately sold at much higher prices than people currently estimate. If that's the case you could receive a windfall. But it's highly unlikely, particularly with financial firms.

[Edited on March 12, 2012 at 5:18 PM. Reason : a]

3/12/2012 5:14:07 PM

Quote :

"..selloff came a lot later than i thought, but alas its here"

ok, i have no idea what's going on/why we're not getting a pause, and my day job is too comsuming to try and make sense and/or trade the market right now

3/13/2012 1:27:27 PM

The benchmark stock is up 30% since the start of the year. Buy high, sell higher still paying off.

3/15/2012 12:28:02 AM

up another $9 in pre-market trading. should break the $600 barrier today.

ridic.

3/15/2012 9:12:27 AM

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but one of these days Apple is going to miss expectations, and their stock is going to tank.

In the meantime though...

3/15/2012 10:21:21 AM