It was sure hard to see a market melt up today, November 22. The Standard & Poor’s 500 was down 0.32% and the NASDAQ Composite fell 1.26%. Market leaders in the melt up rally like Applied Materials (AMAT) and Microsoft (MSFT) were down 1.65% and 0.96%, respectively.
And it was even harder to see the trend I thought might be on its way in my Friday, November 19 post “Forward into the past with tech stocks:We’re seen this market before.” The rotation into tech stocks that I saw on Friday turned into loses of 3.12% for Nvidia (NVDA), and 1.92% for Alphabet (GOOG.)
But I suggest that you take a look at Apple’s (AAPL) performance today. The shares were up a small 0.29%, but that’s signifiant on a day when just about everything else tech was down.
Either Apple is an outlier bucking the trend–in which case it might be worth an investment of a buck or two–or it’s a harbinger of that rotation that I thought the market action signaled on Friday–in which case it is worth an investment of a buck or three.
In either case, I’m not looking at this as a long term investment in Apple. The stock is at an all time high going into 2022, which is shaping up as a year of uncertainties. But as a trade heading into what is traditionally the company’s best quarter of the year? Yep.
The company is projected to report earning next on January 31. Which is a date that I’d keep in mind for getting out of this trade.
In October, for the fourth quarter of Apple’s fiscal year, the company reported almost 70% growth in earnings year over year.
For the prior quarter, the company reported year over year earnings growth of 102%.
Those numbers are a big reason behind the current enthusiasm for Apple shares.
But Wall Street analysts are projecting earnings of $1.88 for the fiscal first quarter. That’s an increase from the $1.68 in that quarter of fiscal 2021.
But that projected growth amounts to just 12% year over year. That’s not the kind of number that pushes a stock that had shown growth of 70% and 102% in the last two quarters up from a record high.
Tomorrow I’ll add shares of Apple to my Volatility Portfolio–the placement is a reminder that this is a short term trade–and to my Jubak Picks Portfolio with a relatively tight target price of $179 a share. (The tight target price is also a reminder that this is a short-term end of the year trade.)
