There are two interesting news cycles converging right now, resulting in a sale on AAPL stock if you’re a long-term investor.
First there’s the overall market and financial newsflow that’s getting increasingly negative and knocking down certain stock sectors for no reason. Sure, we may be heading into recession, but should Intel stock (INTC) really have lost 35 percent of its value in the last four weeks? Probably not. This type of prevailing negative market sentiment is always a good time for bargain hunting.
Then there’s the Apple newsflow. It seems a lot of media were expecting a MacWorld 2008 announcement to match the WHAM of last year’s iPhone announcement. Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle actually had an editorial chastising Apple for not “knocking it out of the park” this year at MacWorld. How naïve. iPhone is a game changer. One every five years is amazing enough. Even a few analysts who should know better had unreasonable MacWorld expectations; check the Apple Investor News “AAPL Analyst” single category view for proof.
Then there was the MacWorld announcement that Apple sold 4 million iPhones in its first 200 days, garnering close to 20 percent of the U.S. smartphone market in the process. And this is met with a 10 percent price decline in two days! I agree with CNBC’s Jim Goldman that both the Intel and Apple declines were overdone and that Apple remains “a long-term island in a sea of short-term waves of uncertainty.”
Of course, it’s natural for such a well-loved company to get pounced on by many of the same media that put it on its pedestal. But a decline with no fundamental news as the cause tells me this is a buying opportunity, courtesy of two converging newsflows.
