Explaining AAPL

John Gruber writes:

Lately, the cor­re­la­tion between AAPL stock run-​ups and actual news regard­ing Apple is zero. Whereas most of the time there is any actual news, even news that to me seems good for Apple, the stock goes down.

Which is some­thing that I’ve been notic­ing for a while, and not just with Apple. It seems like the stock market responds to just about any news by pun­ish­ing the com­pany involved. Did you quar­terly results meet ana­lysts pre­dic­tions? The stock goes down. Did it beat them by too much? The stock goes down. That’s just strange.

But what’s down­right dumb is when  noth­ing hap­pens and the stock rises. How is that pos­si­ble. So here’s my theory: good news does make stock prices go up. But not when most traders first hear about it. To them, any­thing in the press is bad, so any­time they read about a com­pany, the stock goes down. But a week later when they talk to some­body smart enough to know what’s going on, the price starts creep­ing up.

The reason for the sudden dip is that there’s a small but sig­nif­i­cant number of day traders that are noth­ing but reac­tionary lem­mings. On the other hand, there are lots of smart people out there who slowly begin to fill in the larger mass of traders in on the good news. The thing is that the lem­mings all hear about the news at the same time, but the word of mouth fil­ters out slowly over a few weeks.

What do you think?

October 8th, 2007 · Category: News · Tags: , , , , , · Comments Off