Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble

seekingalpha2021-12-16

Summary Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business. In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October. ...

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精彩评论

lrjk1985
2021-12-16
lrjk1985
Pretty clear that the writer doesn’t understand what’s happening with Apple in the next few years.
走在雨中
2021-12-16
走在雨中
基本面还是挺厉害的，要是价格平民化，估计将统治地球😄
Huynhmai
2021-12-16
Huynhmai
No good
大有168
2021-12-16
大有168
等涨到300美元再打你的脸
大有168
2021-12-16
大有168
瞎说
sengfuh
2021-12-16
sengfuh
👍

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162

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}\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">网页链接</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"AAPL","symbol_name":"苹果","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","article_id":"1131877933","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":[],"rights":null,"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"lsy1638401102509","name":"seekingalpha"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"seekingalpha.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"translate_title":"苹果股票现在是泡沫","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"AAPL":0.9},"content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[{"id":690167378,"gmtCreate":1639647919063,"gmtModify":1639647919179,"author":{"id":"3582784322184490","authorId":"3582784322184490","name":"lrjk1985","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fefb89309f2792d9fd2433431d3e68c2","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3582784322184490","idStr":"3582784322184490"},"htmlText":"Pretty clear that the writer doesn’t understand what’s happening with Apple in the next few years.","listText":"Pretty clear that the writer doesn’t understand what’s happening with Apple in the next few years.","text":"Pretty clear that the writer doesn’t understand what’s happening with Apple in the next few years.","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690167378","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":690104518,"gmtCreate":1639645662992,"gmtModify":1639645662992,"author":{"id":"3528737361716173","authorId":"3528737361716173","name":"走在雨中","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","vip":1,"crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3528737361716173","idStr":"3528737361716173"},"htmlText":"基本面还是挺厉害的，要是价格平民化，估计将统治地球😄","listText":"基本面还是挺厉害的，要是价格平民化，估计将统治地球😄","text":"基本面还是挺厉害的，要是价格平民化，估计将统治地球😄","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690104518","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":690378403,"gmtCreate":1639643861081,"gmtModify":1639643861174,"author":{"id":"4102609338650850","authorId":"4102609338650850","name":"Huynhmai","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f768baf3957b993c4ba7d8cf7e4a06b9","vip":1,"crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"4102609338650850","idStr":"4102609338650850"},"htmlText":"No good","listText":"No good","text":"No good","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690378403","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":690923580,"gmtCreate":1639623520146,"gmtModify":1639623520146,"author":{"id":"3480393853816026","authorId":"3480393853816026","name":"大有168","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/84b6768b7a4939ebf38d49f137e8715c","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3480393853816026","idStr":"3480393853816026"},"htmlText":"等涨到300美元再打你的脸","listText":"等涨到300美元再打你的脸","text":"等涨到300美元再打你的脸","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690923580","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":690923176,"gmtCreate":1639623477304,"gmtModify":1639623477304,"author":{"id":"3480393853816026","authorId":"3480393853816026","name":"大有168","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/84b6768b7a4939ebf38d49f137e8715c","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3480393853816026","idStr":"3480393853816026"},"htmlText":"瞎说","listText":"瞎说","text":"瞎说","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690923176","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":690932928,"gmtCreate":1639620197659,"gmtModify":1639620243699,"author":{"id":"3557632577472341","authorId":"3557632577472341","name":"sengfuh","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/221eceb3fd757b12b2f77f2d96659412","vip":1,"crmLevel":4,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3557632577472341","idStr":"3557632577472341"},"htmlText":"👍","listText":"👍","text":"👍","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/690932928","repostId":1131877933,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1131877933","pubTimestamp":1639613067,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1131877933?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-16 08:04","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1131877933","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the busi","content":"<p>Summary</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Apple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.</li>\n <li>In particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.</li>\n <li>While it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.</li>\n <li>Apple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.</li>\n <li>Apple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.</li>\n</ul>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Apple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business</b></p>\n<p>Many Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Some observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Analyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract</b></p>\n<p>If the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Virtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.</p>\n<p>The metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.</p>\n<p>There's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&amp;D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.</p>\n<p><b>Apple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond</b></p>\n<p>1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&amp;P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&amp;P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>Since late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.</p>","source":"lsy1638401102509","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Stock Is Now A Bubble</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Stock Is Now A Bubble\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-16 08:04 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\n...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475237-apple-stock-is-now-a-bubble","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1131877933","content_text":"Summary\n\nApple's stock has reached unprecedented levels without a corresponding increase in the business.\nIn particular, Apple has surged 20% in six weeks after a so-so earnings report in October.\nWhile it's impossible to tell how far momentum will carry Apple, the value of the stock increasingly relies on highly speculative assumptions such as virtual reality and the Apple car.\nApple faces challenges in 2022 ranging from antitrust to supply chain to a softening American consumer.\nApple used to be my biggest holding, and I've never put an outright sell call on the stock, but now is the time.\n\n\n\nApple's Stock Has Come Unhinged From Its Business\nMany Seeking Alpha readers will consider saying this as the height of blasphemy, but Apple Inc. (AAPL) - the world's most valuable company and symbol of American capitalism - has become the subject of a speculative bubble. Apple's price is now far higher than its business fundamentals justify without resorting to overly optimistic projections of the future. Apple turned in a so-so earnings report in October, after which the stock surged to all-time highs. Additionally, this is only anecdotal, but the local Apple stores here in Texas haven't been quite as busy as I would expect before Christmas.\n\nSome observers have linked the surge in Apple to speculators buying short-dated call options in the stock, a behavior more commonly seen in meme stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). This would make sense because the recent $500 billion surge in market cap doesn't when based on the reality on the ground. Apple now trades for over 30x earnings, with the analyst consensus earnings estimates expecting a peak this year or slow growth at best.\n\nAnalyst Predictions Are Increasingly Abstract\nIf the present numbers are so-so, why is Apple stock surging ahead of the profits the company is making? Recent analyst reports seem to love to emphasize the abstract, such as virtual reality, the \"metaverse\", and the prospect of an Apple car.\n\nVirtual reality is interesting, but as someone who has played around with the technology (I walked the plank), it was pretty fun, but it didn't change my life. Having a friend own one is as good as owning one yourself-a key contrast with iPhone. Take Meta (FB), the corporation formerly known as Facebook. Meta has sold about 10 million Oculus VR headsets. The sets start at $300, so I figure that at a 30% margin they made about a billion dollars from it. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot less than $2.8 trillion (1/2800th to be exact of Apple's market cap). I would expect Apple to make a play in virtual reality, but I would not expect fireworks here from an earnings perspective.\nThe metaverse is another curiosity here. Silicon Valley has been crushed by whistleblowers as of late, so what better way to get the attention off of antitrust issues, employment issues, and societal issues than to put your smartest marketing people in a room for a couple of days until they come up with something you can launch a huge PR campaign with? Apple isn't the main driver of social problems coming out of Silicon Valley, but I would not have high expectations for the profit potential of the Metaverse- most of the use cases tossed around seem indistinguishable from using FaceTime.\nThere's a huge amount of interest in electric cars right now, so the best way to get some hype into a company (besides putting Bitcoin on your corporate balance sheet) is to generate speculation that you might produce an electric car. Apple has ample R&D resources, but to enter the car business for them makes about as much sense to me as starting an Apple Airline. The car business is notorious for being labor and capital-intensive and for having low margins. Apple could simply license a car, but are manufacturers going to be willing to shell out the royalties Apple wants, and is Apple comfortable dealing with potential brand issues if the car ends up having recalls or safety issues? I don't think the car business is a good fit for Apple's expertise in consumer electronics.\nApple's Challenges For 2022 And Beyond\n1. Whether earnings estimates are realistic without continued fiscal stimulus is an issue for the whole US economy, but a particularly thorny one for consumer-facing companies like Apple. Apple had its best year ever in 2021 as consumers were flush with cash from government stimulus. All of these concerns aren't specific to Apple, but they do affect the company.\n\n2. The central question for 2022 and beyond is whether Apple's pre-pandemic earnings in the $3 per share range or so are more indicative of long-term demand for Apple products, or whether the $5.67 per share that they earned in 2021 is the new normal. I believe the earnings estimates for the stock market at large are too high for 2022 in the absence of stimulus spending. (i.e., the typical American household made a ballpark of $60,000 post-tax in 2021, but $10,000 of this was directly or indirectly from the stimulus, such as the three rounds of checks, expanded unemployment, the student loan pause, etc.). As it turns out, if you give the typical American family an extra $10,000 to spend that they don't have to work for, statistically, many of these people will upgrade their iPhones. Going forward, consumers will only be able to spend what they actually earn. Apple has positive tailwinds from services revenue, but I don't think they can sustain iPhone sales at anywhere near the level they have achieved in 2021. I'd guess Apple earns somewhere between $4.50 and $5.00 in 2022.\n\n3. Apple cited the supply chain as a challenge in their last quarterly earnings conference call. I think the supply chain will be less of an issue in 2022 than it has been in 2021, but because consumer demand is lower in the face of falling inflation-adjusted wages and no more stimulus. This said, chip shortages will not help Apple's cause, and the longer they go on, the more it caps Apple's upside earnings.\n\n4. Apple's golden goose is services revenue. Increasingly, however, Apple is running up against antitrust laws. We've seen Apple cut App store fees recently under pressure from regulators, and we've seen Apple and Google (GOOG) get scrutiny for the $15 billion or so that Google will pay Apple this year for the right to be the default search engine. Apple makes more from their deal with Google than they likely ever will from the Metaverse. The risk is that regulators in the US or EU end up pushing back on this and cutting off the flow of money here. This deal is worth about 1/6th of Apple's net income for the year, and even more if iPhone sales slow.\n\n5. Apple's earnings per share growth has been driven in large part by buybacks. When Apple traded at a 10-12x PE throughout most of the 2010s, this allowed Apple to get huge returns on shares it bought back. With the PE ratio over 30x now, this strategy is only 1/3rd as effective, and dependent on the business to continue to outperform at levels that are historically very hard to achieve. I'd rather see Apple pay a dividend here.\n\n6. Believe it or not, Apple traded at a discount to the S&P 500 PE ratio for much of the 2010s. Now it trades for a large premium. I generally don't make market calls based on sentiment, but I think a PE ratio closer to the S&P 500 at large (20x or so) is more appropriate than a large premium. There's no particular reason the market will enforce this, but that's where I feel is correct based on Apple's underlying business. This would put the stock price around $100, and that's about where I would buy the stock.\n\n\nConclusion\nSince late 2019, Apple stock has been on an epic bull run. Had this run been fully reflected in the long-run success of the business, this wouldn't be too worrisome. But with Apple's valuation increasingly reaching exuberant levels while concerns about the sustainability of its earnings mount, Apple's stock has the dual problem of having earnings estimates that will be hard to live up to and having a high valuation on top of it. Formerly my largest holding, Apple looks like it's in a bubble here after its November gamma squeeze. Apple's business is going to have a very difficult time living up to the sky-high expectations for the stock.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"}],"isCommentEnd":false,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":162,"commentSize":30,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":false,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.29.2","shortVersion":"4.29.2","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"laohu8","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/1131877933"}