I remember buffett loved it as a dividend stock and it rallied hard. Just seems like a strange contradiction from a tech company but the market loved it

That said, I'm selling some Dec puts here. I think AAPL is moving the market and when selling in AAPL stops the market should start to rally. I don't personally have an opinion on AAPL other than I think people will step in and buy soon. Seems like a good spot to get long delta against some other shorts

MacBook Air's keyboard on a MacBook Pro 15 and I'll be back on the MacBook Pro running Bootcamp train.

Sounds like you got destroyed

A year later:



Apple is the blue at the bottom. Keep underperforming the index, boys (and MSFT). It's noble work you're doing. Oh and this is with everything going your way in the best way possible (economy, business cycle, competitors, etc)

Because AAPL is down and the market is up?

Right, everything going Apple's way.

China trade war isn't happening and Apple isn't the most visible company for China and Chinese consumers to target.

Right.

Apple has been, is, and will be priced like a cash cow stock with low 3-5% growth.

To be clear, I think the real issue is that people are starting to think Apple has a significant probability of seeing negative growth soon and the recent trade war is just a negative catalyst.

It has been until a few minor clouds.

Except it's not a cash cow. It has 40% margins selling a luxury good in an industry with 0% margins and major decadal technology turnovers (c.f. Blackberry, Palm, Nokia).

Yeah. Cook did this with his "not breaking out numbers" first and foremost. That amplied all other fears 5-fold. Not that sales weren't already declining. But not enough for this.

Do not buy this is a services company even if that's what they continue to sell the public. Whether I've been bullish or bearish, it was and still is about unit sales. If someone doesn't want to brag about how many things they are selling, what does that tell you? That earnings call is still a disaster... This arrogance that you can keep raising prices on everything while the gap vs their competition is narrowing will be tested. If the retention rate worsens especially as the upgrade cycle is being elongated, major risk here for supposedly a pretty low risk stock/valuation.

A luxury goods company with 40% margins sounds like a cash cow to me.

Nice arbitrary 6 year timeframe.



Plus c. 10% dividend outperformance. Fyi it's not a shame to have been outperformed by MSFT over this timeline, they're probably 1st percentile of large cap stocks over this period.

Fyi2 i bought both around the same time and total return has been within a 30% (3.5%IRR) band with currently MSFT outperforming but 3 months back it was AAPL up 30%.

Buffett confirmed giant cuck/loser for buying this turd. As I've always said, Buffett has zero edge or skill in public stocks. He's good at backroom deals and buyouts and using insurance floats, but he couldn't beat a dart throwing monkey at picking public stocks on a par with the average person.

You have to wonder if he'll exit here and take the humiliation/slippage or prop it up and get in deeper.

Munger > Buffet

IBM all over again.

Microsoft now and forever > Apple

Berkshire's average cost is 141 though.

It's amazing they still sell so many overpriced phones given all the headwinds.
At least they have high margins and net cash to soften the fall. What are all the phone makers that don't make a profit in a growing economy going to do in this environment?
Apple might be pushing it price wise, but as a business, it could have been much worse off if the phones cost half of what they do now.

Charlie wanted to buy even more AAPL than they bought.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/char...ressively.html

This is just silly.

Are you just trolling or do you really not understand how Buffett thinks about investments? I'm sure he doesn't like seeing AAPL revenue decline by 8% but he's very happy to see the stock price fall by 10%. He'd rather it keep falling than prop it up (I heard he actually said he'd like the price to fall more, although I don't have a direct quote).

Nope, Apple is an idiotic buy. It's a luxury goods company with long term extremely unsustainable margins and a rapidly shrinking experience gap, in an industry where the top players go bankrupt every 15 years. It's one of the greatest cuck investments you can make.
I understand just fine how Buffett thinks about investments: The loser bought into IBM high at the worst possible time and then panic sold low as the business he thought was solid unraveled. He then put that money into Apple because he didn't know what else to do. Now that investment is going to go south and he'll panic sell this too in the next economic downturn when Apple margins go to zero.

Buffett's public stock picks are provably awful going back 20 years. He has no ability to pick stocks. This is separate from leveraging an insurance float, buying private businesses, getting amazing deals (like Goldman Sachs who sold him dirt cheap warrants for liquidity in the GFC), etc. That stuff he's great at. But in terms of stock picking, and especially tech stock picking, he's less sophisticated than your cousin Billy Bob.

In reality it's probably less than that. I saw an interview in February of 2017 where Buffett said they had stopped buying shares because it was so expensive and the ticker showed a $136.50 stock price. He said in that interview that at the time they had around 133 million shares of AAPL which is just over half of the 252 million AAPL shares Berkshire owns now. When the price gets more expensive they tend to buy less. In Q3 2018 Berkshire bought just 523k shares, so a very insignificant amount.

Interview for reference:

I'm not sure I understand what a cuck investment is nor do I understand why the most successful investor this world has ever seen should be called a loser.

By using the word cuck are you asserting that Buffett's wife was having sex with other men? Was it not Buffett that for many years had 2 wives at one time. Maybe that makes him a playboy rather than a cuck?

Like all men, Buffett is good at some things and horrible at others. He was a God at seeing the big picture and investing in the second half of the 20th century, and especially at leveraging an insurance float, making his insurance customers thus take the tail risk of his returns. That and a shrewd business sense at old world businesses (he himself admits he stayed away from tech because he is hopeless at understanding it) and a very long term view are the core of his success.

Of course he's a loser at picking public stocks for the last 20 years. The data is in. The world has changed and it is nothing like the world in which he prospered. He cannot cut it in the modern world without handicaps. In most of the second half of the 20th century you could buy amazing mainstream businesses for an average P/E of 5 or less. 5!. That stuff doesn't exist any more or anything like it.
I'm talking about someone laughably self-owning as relates to picking public stocks. I don't care about his sex life. Didn't know he had two wives though. Good for him.

And in case you're not aware of how this all works, and how Buffett got rich:

Here's how Warren Buffett used insurance to become one of the world's richest people

He basically continually sold puts on a catastrophe not happening - and the insured were on the hook if the tail event ever came in. It's a legal scam, basically.

And because his insurance business grew year after year, he always had a fresh inflow of other people's money inflowing which he could use to invest in new items. This meant he never had to sell or rebalance what he owned for new capital. Which was why he could hold for so long.



It's a great idea, but please understand that the notion that Buffett got rich from public stock picking is simply wrong.

Interesting perspective. FWIW, I thought I would be a buyer of AAPL at these levels but I am not.

I'm glad you don't care about Buffett's sex life because that's a very polarizing topic which could have been argued ad nauseum.

I knew he had used money from his insurance business but didn't know all the details. I appreciate the link.

a bit of an overreaction given a lot of earlier signals, but what do i know. Personally not a buyer still but very reasonable valuation comparing to the overall market, also given services is 10B a quarter business with pretty fat margins, solid moat and still growing which i would think would more then compensate for iphones decline in the longer term.