Today we will look at a two opinions on Apple’s share price. One will be completely bananas, and the other will not.
Representing bananas is USA Today’s Matt Krantz.
“Apple stock destroys $218B: How low can it go?” (Tip o’ the antlers to @mylestaylor and Chuck.)
Apple is the poster child of this market crash. It took a market meltdown to help expose just how overvalued the stock was.
And Krantz is the poster child for the Cult of Apple Doom. You may not have seen his picture, though, because the posters are only up in the Apple Doom Bunker. Which is under a Pancake House in Lansing, MI.
You remember Krantz’s many craaaazy manifestos, though, right? For example when he predicted the Microsoft Band would outsell the Apple Watch. He wrote that. Really. And somehow he’s still able to write things on the Internet without exploding from shame. Is that fair? No, it is not. We do not live in a fair universe, Bobby. The Macalope is sorry to have to tell you that.
Don’t cry, Bobby. On the plus side, George Lucas is no longer in charge of Star Wars. That’s good, right? Sure it is.
Bobby is very emotional for a 38-year-old man. The Macalope doesn’t even want to tell him about the time Krantz, for some unfathomable reason, compared Apple Watch sales to Windows Phone sales to show how badly Apple was doing. It might break Bobby.
The question now is how much lower Apple shares can do.
Nowhere to go but down! Like, say as low as $39.65 which, Krantz admits, is something of a “worst-case scenario”. What, is “asteroid strikes Cupertino” off the table for some reason?
$39.65 is what you get if you apply HP’s P/E ratio to Apple. Which is a thing you can do. And then you can ask yourself, “Why the heck did I just do that? It makes no sense.” Because if you think HP’s future potential is the same as Apple’s you probably shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery like a combine, an automobile, a computer, a calculator or a bowl of shrimp cocktail.
How did you start a house fire with a bowl of shrimp cocktail, Matt?!
Let’s just stop poking ourselves in the eye with Krantz’s nonsense and instead read this piece by Jamal Carnette (tip o’ the antlers to @JonyIveParody), who takes on perpetual wrongness machine Trip Chowdhry for saying Tim Cook has been “fostering a culture of ‘bozos’” at Apple.
Chowdhry’s call appeared to succeed in one key metric, however: It increased his personal profile, and that of the firm he founded with wide-ranging coverage on his bearish note. For analysts, then, there’s a perverse incentive in having the loudest, most audacious opinion on a stock or the market overall.
Krantz doesn’t run his own firm, but he’s clearly operating from the same playbook. But even Chowdhry now thinks Apple is undervalued. When you’re further in the Cult of Apple Doom than Trip Chowdhry, it’s probably time to question your life choices. Like, “Is my favorite pomade possibly filled with lead particles?”
Carnette places blame on someone other than Tim Cook for Apple’s stock performance.
…thankless Wall Street and its analysts, who price a stock at a P/E of half the S&P 500 after watching the company grow its EPS figure 43%.
His conclusion:
Before you go call other people bozos, perhaps you should first ask if the moniker applies to yourself.
Jamal, call the Macalope. We should have lunch.