Meta Questions on Apple’s Four Billion Dollar Dip
As most folks know, last week Apple briefly lost 4 billion dollars in value after Engadget (unwittingly) posted a fake memo saying that the iPhone and Leopard were being delayed. You can get a decent history and some perspective on it here. There are all kinds of discussions trying to figure out who was behind the memo, whether Engadget behaved properly, and whether Apple has any liabilities to its shareholders.
A while ago I realized that the stock market is not a place I will ever understand. I’m not a fan of admitting defeat when it comes to understanding things. But accepting that the stock market makes no sense to me was kind of a relief. And while I’m (clearly) no expert, I don’t understand why people aren’t raising what seems to me to be the bigger issue wrt the Apple dip. I have two fundamental questions:
- Why have we set up a system of markets where 4 billion dollars of value in a public company can disappear because Engadget publishes a rumor?
- Even if the rumor had turned out to be real, and Apple was delaying its products, should that really represent a 4 billion dollar devaluation of their business?
I’m sure some smart people will laugh at my naive questions, but I really do wonder… It’s kind of wacky to me that the valuation of a huge international business can be so affected by a blog post. If I dismiss the entire stock market as basically gambling then it makes a little more sense – kind of like a rumor that a star athlete broke his leg before a big game affecting the odds briefly until the rumor turns out to be false. But then I need to put the entire stock market in the ‘Las Vegas’ bucket in my head, which is probably the right thing to do. Fun, entertaining, not something to make a core component of your life or business.
In some ways the second question bothers me even more. What would a delay of Leopard and the iPhone really mean for Apple? Would they sell fewer Macs because people were waiting for the new OS? They could always offer upgrade coupons like Microsoft did. That would affect the bottom line in the short term but I doubt have any long-lasting impact. And the iPhone getting delayed? The bulk of the plans for any device that is going to come out this year and be competitive with the iPhone were set in stone before the iPhone was announced. Turnaround time for hardware devices (especially ones trying to be on the cutting edge of technology) are longer than most consumers imagine.
I know there are smart folks who do understand the public markets, what drives them, and have logical responses (as well as fat bank accounts) to explain all this. But likely it will all be lost on my simple mind.
Join the discussion 4 Comments
Eric
May 22, 2007 at 6:10 am
If they were delayed, that would mean that revenues from those products would also be delayed. The stock market is pricing Apple’s shares assuming that those products are on time, and that they add to Apple’s profits starting at those times. Remember, the stock price is a reflection of the perceived value of the company, and a large part of that perceived value is in the anticipation of the future cash flows that company will earn. The longer those cash flows are delayed, the less value they have because of the time value of money – $100 next year is worth less than $100 today, because I can take my $100 today and invest it over that year.
So when new information is relayed to the market that revenues will be delayed, the stock price no longer reflects an accurate picture of the perceived value of the company. It also makes analysts question whether Apple can deliver on its plans, which also impacts its future value. Is that worth a $4 billion drop? I can’t say, but hopefully that helps place things in context.
Hillel
May 22, 2007 at 8:11 am
Yes… this makes sense. And I also wonder whether delayed iPhone revenues really represent $4 billion in lost value. That said, to me the value of a company needs to be based on a true long term outlook. Products and revenue streams take much much longer to create than press releases would have us believe. I suppose in a world where money is constantly being moved around quarter to quarter (or month to month or even day to day) this type of speculation makes sense. But to think that a company’s value changes this dramatically because of a single quarter slip (without the benefit of some type of scandal or other huge surprise) is wacky to me.
And my real issue is that companies seem addicted to the cash infusion they can get from the public market even though being tied to this type of speculative behavior is ultimately (imho) unhealthy for a business owner who wants to think about the business with an eye for the long term.
David
May 23, 2007 at 7:09 pm
In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan”, he writes that people love remembering good stories. A 2% drop blamed on a fake Engadget story is a good story that spreads like wilddire. An ordinary 2% change is not a story worthy of telling. I grabbed the 3 months historical data on AAPL from finance.yahoo.com into Excel and calculated the % spread (delta between high & low versus open price) across all those dates. AAPL regularly has 1, 2, and 3% spreads in a day.
On any other day, the 2% change wouldn’t have been memorable. But on one particular day, there was a good story to be told…
Steve
May 27, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Hey Hillel, if you look at the stock market every second, or some small granularity of time, it likely won’t make sense. Stocks always swing too high and too low. But, if you look at a stock over a longer period of time, it usually makes sense. Walter pointed me at a bunch of writings about efficient market theory and got me hooked up with the right set of indexing funds that are based on efficient market theory. Warren Buffet has always said that investing should be boring and he recommends people invest using index funds. You can also check out IFA.COM. There is a bunch of information up there about why trying to play individual stocks or mutual funds is a fools game. However, trying to guess what a stock is going to do, based on technical patterns, is still a lot of fun, but I definately wouldn’t bet my retirement on short-term trading.