All things STOCKS

#17,026
#17,026
Thunder Good-Oil said:
A correction or bull market is certainly possible. But more like 20% or 25% and nothing like the NASDAQ falling 77% in 2000-2022 or the 40% drop in 2008/2009 that took until 2015 to bounce back from.

I think that interest rates, inflation, and unemployment numbers won’t shock equity markets. But it’s yet TBD if the spending can get under control while reducing taxes and NOT losing complete control of the debt level.

I don’t expect that tariffs (or the threats of tariffs) will significantly damage the economy. But getting enough labor into the country LEGALLY will be huge if domestic manufacturing is going to be rebuilt. AI would help, but labor unions will resist those innovations.

It looks like NVDA isn’t being picked on like they have been by the financial media for a month or two. But now AAPL seems to be the new whipping boy.
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Yeah...why is AAPL the new whipping boy? I am confused.

Last year, it was odd for Warren B to dump so much of AAPL in a short span (for him). The market absorbed all that and still moved it to new heights.

But the wind has gone out of the sails.

Trump and China uncertainty behind the thinking maybe?
 
#17,029
#17,029
Jax_Vol said:
Yeah...why is AAPL the new whipping boy? I am confused.

Last year, it was odd for Warren B to dump so much of AAPL in a short span (for him). The market absorbed all that and still moved it to new heights.

But the wind has gone out of the sails.

Trump and China uncertainty behind the thinking maybe?
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Buffett still owns a huge amount of Apple stock. Before selling, the shares represented 50% of BRK’s public holdings and 25% of the entire company. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a rebalancing of holdings. But MSFT might be a decent hedge if he’s shifting his philosophy away from owning Apple.

I think that AAPL’s biggest near term issues are access to the Chinese consumer market and too much revenue concentrated in iPhones. I don’t think that Chinese manufacturing and supply chains (rare earth materials particularly) are as big of a concern. Another thing currently in news feeds is that a TikTok ban can subject AAPL to a lot of retaliation from CCP policies. But, how much are they losing from state sponsored or endorsed IP theft from those thieves? Apple might be better off in the long term unwinding any relationship with China/CCP.

Long term, I believe in the viability of AAPL’s overall eco-system. Cloud computing and services based revenue. Interconnected devices. Things like robust integration of Apple Watches and iPhones and medical devices and services. Also connected homes. Navigation and shopping. Basically everything consumer. Instead of having a subscription for Life Alert, and another for live TV, and another for music, and another for a monitored home security system, etc. consumers could simply subscribe to a single Apple service. Of course they’d then have the anti-trust regulators to deal with. Biden would block the innovation. Trump would let them expand without limitations.

AAPL and AMZN will need to adapt to co-existence or face a bloody war over consumer dollars.
 
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#17,030
#17,030
Jax_Vol said:
Ballsy right there. I'm thinking the elevator is going mostly straight up for a couple of weeks.

Is there news coming pre-open tomorrow?
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That’s my expectation as well. Equities fell from a short lived post election rally to a lot of negative pressure through most of November and December. But I’m not going to take either position in a short term trade. I do think there is volatility ahead. So an options straddle makes sense if I messed with those strategies.
 
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#17,031
#17,031
Thunder Good-Oil said:
Buffett still owns a huge amount of Apple stock. Before selling, the shares represented 50% of BRK’s public holdings and 25% of the entire company. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a rebalancing of holdings. But MSFT might be a decent hedge if he’s shifting his philosophy away from owning Apple.

I think that AAPL’s biggest near term issues are access to the Chinese consumer market and too much revenue concentrated in iPhones. I don’t think that Chinese manufacturing and supply chains (rare earth materials particularly) are as big of a concern. Another thing currently in news feeds is that a TikTok ban can subject AAPL to a lot of retaliation from CCP policies. But, how much are they losing from state sponsored or endorsed IP theft from those thieves? Apple might be better off in the long term unwinding any relationship with China/CCP.

Long term, I believe in the viability of AAPL’s overall eco-system. Cloud computing and services based revenue. Interconnected devices. Things like robust integration of Apple Watches and iPhones and medical devices and services. Also connected homes. Navigation and shopping. Basically everything consumer. Instead of having a subscription for Life Alert, and another for live TV, and another for music, and another for a monitored home security system, etc. consumers could simply subscribe to a single Apple service. Of course they’d then have the anti-trust regulators to deal with. Biden would block the innovation. Trump would let them expand without limitations.

AAPL and AMZN will need to adapt to co-existence or face a bloody war over consumer dollars.
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Good points and well stated. I'm thinking I read somewhere that iphone sales were off in China. Unsure about overall Asia. Maybe WB was simply rebalancing.

With Elon advising Trump, I think that all of the Mag-7 will continue to do well. Musk is somewhat petty, so unsure if he has any axes to grind with any of the big boy IT founders/CEO's.

From the ole FAANG grouping days, Netflix earnings call was good so that is a nice start.
 
#17,032
#17,032
Thunder Good-Oil said:
That’s my expectation as well. Equities fell from a short lived post election rally to a lot of negative pressure through most of November and December. But I’m not going to take either position in a short term trade. I do think there is volatility ahead. So an options straddle makes sense if I messed with those strategies.
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Yeah. But, everyone is buying today, so may indeed drop in the Thursday am. He might hit on a 2% swing.

Lot of movement right now. But trending upwards in a somewhat jagged shape
 
#17,033
#17,033
Thunder Good-Oil said:
Buffett still owns a huge amount of Apple stock. Before selling, the shares represented 50% of BRK’s public holdings and 25% of the entire company. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a rebalancing of holdings. But MSFT might be a decent hedge if he’s shifting his philosophy away from owning Apple.

I think that AAPL’s biggest near term issues are access to the Chinese consumer market and too much revenue concentrated in iPhones. I don’t think that Chinese manufacturing and supply chains (rare earth materials particularly) are as big of a concern. Another thing currently in news feeds is that a TikTok ban can subject AAPL to a lot of retaliation from CCP policies. But, how much are they losing from state sponsored or endorsed IP theft from those thieves? Apple might be better off in the long term unwinding any relationship with China/CCP.

Long term, I believe in the viability of AAPL’s overall eco-system. Cloud computing and services based revenue. Interconnected devices. Things like robust integration of Apple Watches and iPhones and medical devices and services. Also connected homes. Navigation and shopping. Basically everything consumer. Instead of having a subscription for Life Alert, and another for live TV, and another for music, and another for a monitored home security system, etc. consumers could simply subscribe to a single Apple service. Of course they’d then have the anti-trust regulators to deal with. Biden would block the innovation. Trump would let them expand without limitations.

AAPL and AMZN will need to adapt to co-existence or face a bloody war over consumer dollars.
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Every so often AAPL asks the existential question of whether or not it is a growth stock. They are the victim of their own past success because they have such a long history of introducing revolutionary products that when they go several years without one, people worry if it is starting to transition into a cash cow. A great company, but not a sexy company anymore.
 
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#17,034
#17,034
05_never_again said:
Every so often AAPL asks the existential question of whether or not it is a growth stock. They are the victim of their own past success because they have such a long history of introducing revolutionary products that when they go several years without one, people worry if it is starting to transition into a cash cow. A great company, but not a sexy company anymore.
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I’m thinking that their future has to be based on a higher level of services (subscription) revenue if they are to continue growing.

One positive, without looking it up, is that I don’t think that the earnings multiple is unreasonable.
 
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#17,035
#17,035
Jax_Vol said:
Good points and well stated. I'm thinking I read somewhere that iphone sales were off in China. Unsure about overall Asia. Maybe WB was simply rebalancing.

With Elon advising Trump, I think that all of the Mag-7 will continue to do well. Musk is somewhat petty, so unsure if he has any axes to grind with any of the big boy IT founders/CEO's.

From the ole FAANG grouping days, Netflix earnings call was good so that is a nice start.
Click to expand...

I’m amazed that Netflix has had such a big run. I guess the two big shifts in their business model have worked out favorably. Adding advertising and pushing back on sharing of subscriptions. But they might be ahead of reality for now. Their cost of acquiring programming is still a hinderance to profitability. I would expect subscriber growth to slow as the post shared password surge subsides. But the advertising revenue growth could have legs. NFLX is more like a huge content delivery platform (similar to Comcast, Charter, DirectV/Dish, etc) rather than a programmer (ESPN, USA, HGTV, CNN, etc) but the latter’s advertising revenues are typically 2 or 3 times as much as the affiliate (subscribers) revenue. ESPN probably being an exception as their fees to cable companies to carry their networks had been enormous before cord cutting came into play.

I just saw something yesterday about Meta not having much of an investment in their own cloud platform. That could be a problem in the long term if they are dependent on MSFT, Amazon Web Services, and Alphabet/Google.
 
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#17,036
#17,036
Thunder Good-Oil said:
I’m thinking that their future has to be based on a higher level of services (subscription) revenue if they are to continue growing.

One positive, without looking it up, is that I don’t think that the earnings multiple is unreasonable.
Click to expand...
Absent another blowout product launch (like the iPod or iPhone), I think that's what it has to be. And even then, if subscription revenue is what their future is based on then that probably doesn't justify a super high multiple.
 
#17,038
#17,038
Rakovina Therapeutics is a nice watch for the AI boost announced by Trump. Tomorrow is going to be a big bounce.
 
#17,043
#17,043
Go aeiou said:
Are we going to hear anything on tariffs?
Mexico, Canada, China, others?
Seems like it likely would disrupt stock mkts.
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Announcing and quickly implementing an across the board tariff makes it less effective for their real intent. They can be utilized case by case and country by country with different objectives.

The allies need to pony up by building stronger militaries. We don’t need to go it alone as the world police force.

Mexico needs to partner establishing orderly border crossings and to end the fentanyl crisis. The cartels need to be destroyed. They also don’t need to be cozying up with China.

I’m not sure what we would need from Canada. Probably make their consumer markets more accessible with less protectionist policies. Maybe just work on fixing a trade imbalance. I’m sure that we’re buying a lot of energy from them. How do they reciprocate? The should also spend more to defend our hemisphere. Attacks from some of our adversaries would cross the Arctic region - so maybe there’s more that can be done there. I also don’t know what Canada’s trading relationship is with China.

China and the CCP simply needs to be crushed. They’ve all but declared economic war on us. We need to end their s***. Threats of annexing Taiwan. Setting up shop at both ends of the Panama Canal. Continuing to steal IP. Gathering data on everything American (including things like spy balloon flyovers and having software embedded in social media platforms).

Tariffs need to be used strategically. Haphazardly rolling them out could damage important international relationships. But we shouldn’t be taken advantage of.
 
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#17,044
#17,044
Thunder Good-Oil said:
Announcing and quickly implementing an across the board tariff makes it less effective for their real intent. They can be utilized case by case and country by country with different objectives.

The allies need to pony up by building stronger militaries. We don’t need to go it alone as the world police force.

Mexico needs to partner establishing orderly border crossings and to end the fentanyl crisis. The cartels need to be destroyed. They also don’t need to be cozying up with China.

I’m not sure what we would need from Canada. Probably make their consumer markets more accessible with less protectionist policies. Maybe just work on fixing a trade imbalance. I’m sure that we’re buying a lot of energy from them. How do they reciprocate? The should also spend more to defend our hemisphere. Attacks from some of our adversaries would cross the Arctic region - so maybe there’s more that can be done there. I also don’t know what Canada’s trading relationship is with China.

China and the CCP simply needs to be crushed. They’ve all but declared economic war on us. We need to end their s***. Threats of annexing Taiwan. Setting up shop at both ends of the Panama Canal. Continuing to steal IP. Gathering data on everything American (including things like spy balloon flyovers and having software embedded in social media platforms).

Tariffs need to be used strategically. Haphazardly rolling them out could damage important international relationships. But we shouldn’t be taken advantage of.
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Would that make any difference? Their entire country has a population just over the size of California.
 
#17,046
#17,046
mrorange211 said:
Sold at 2.17 this AM. Will go heavy into same puts today at close.
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I've been out running errands all day and just came in. Was curious how that worked out for you.

I like it! There does seem to be some current pattern of low volume walking things down within first couple of hours dips.

People are antsy and not sleeping soundly I guess? Unsure what is driving the behavior. No big dogs are coming out swinging at opening bell.
 
#17,047
#17,047
05_never_again said:
Would that make any difference? Their entire country has a population just over the size of California.
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Another $20 billion (per year). But it’s bad optics when anybody skirts the 2% GDP commitment. They need to pay their fair share and set an example for every other free country to follow.

It’s strategic geography. They might not be able to float a fleet of air craft carriers, but they can build up a missile defense system and/or patrol marine activity.
 
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