Hello sportsfans!

An awesome day for the underdogs and not so for the favorites.  AAPL and Duke both suffered routs.  Duke will get to take it out on it's next opponent.  AAPL perhaps will take some time.

For me, this is the market at it's most puzzling.  This company is the envy of any operating company in the world.  I think the only thing that supercedes it is the hedge fund business.  Margins are tremendous and, yes, they probably only can come down, but, truly that would only be coming down to merely great instead of insane for a company of this size.  They have $137 billion dollars in cash which means you are paying about $330 billion for a company that will generate over $40 billion in EARNINGS this next year.

I actually read a comment from an analyst stating that "AAPL is a broken company".  Wow.  If they are broken, how is everyone else doing?  I guess he is short everything (probably not putting his money where his mouth is).

About the only thing negative that I can gather is that revenues are not going to be growing at 18% a year ad infinitum.  Ok, but not only would that be truly shocking if they could grow at that rate given their size, but the key point is that the company is not priced that way.  A company that is expected to grow earnings at that rate would trade at, I don't know, say 158 PE like AMZN?   I am not expecting AAPL to trade at a lofty PE but I don't think it should be a stretch for it to trade around the market multiple of 12-15.

We may be witnessing a different phenomena.  AAPL is clearly owned by many and is perhaps in the unique position that there is no one "left to buy", or rather needs an impetus to get fresh buying interest.  I have been thinking that an increase in the dividend to the 3-4% level would perhaps get the market to price the stock with a more reasonable multiple.  The company clearly generates a lot of cash and does not necessarily look very acquisition hungry.  Either way, the stock is cheap.