Last week my company launched the first-ever Apple-only financial news site, on the same week AAPL shares hit record highs.
I was chatting with USA Today investing columnist Matt Krantz and he jokingly wondered if the emergence of my site was a contrarian indicator. That is, that the stock would soon tank. This was on Tuesday with the price just above $110 (it was in the 60s a year ago). This week the stock breached $120!
Investors and traders often look at unusually high media interest as the sign a stock has topped out. For the last few months, the iPhone media coverage has been huge, even by Apple press coverage standards.
We’re bound to have a pullback soon, but regardless of the anticipation surrounding the iPhone, a closer look at the Apple newsflow tells me that most media don’t fully understand how much the longer-term Apple story is about the Mac, which is slowly and steadily growing market share.
Most media are iPod-focused and now, iPhone crazed. But the Mac alone could dramatically grow the company. UBS Investment Research analyst Ben Reitzes said last week that his projections showed a 94 percent increase in Apple laptop sales in April, as seen in an AppleInsider article. Wow.
This is probably part of what led Georges Yared, CIO of Yared Investment Research, to predict boldly last week, in a blog post at BloggingStocks.com, that Apple could someday be bigger than IBM. Double-wow.
As a longtime investor and media observer of Apple, I say AAPL still has a long way to go -- if you have a long-term horizon. But don’t let the media hype on iPhone obscure the Mac and Mac OS X story. A small increase in Mac market share has huge implications for Apple.
So where will AAPL be at year’s end? And why? And what else is the Apple newsflow telling us, or hiding from us? More to come…
(Disclosure: the author personally owns shares in AAPL.)
