Their revolutionary idea lately is to buy a ####load of their own stock. And they have bandwidth to bounce themselves off 400 many times over. This takes a lot of the risk out of the equation for institutional investors.
The attractiveness of owning Apple is the lack of the degree of risk investing in other tech companies comes with. Apple has not cornered the market on innovating. If you're investing in a company because you believe they are about to release a revolutionary technology, you either have inside information, or are just playing roulette.
Is anyone doing this though Spock? I think I mostly agree with your position, but I think you're being a bit dismissive of Apple's recent history of innovation.
I doubt anyone is putting any real money into AAPL while completely ignoring their balance sheet. What's so enticing to investors is the prospect of getting a company that seems "extremely undervalued" per it's balance sheet, while having the upside of being the most innovative technology company in the world the past decade.
You just did it in your post.
There is no more UPSIDE to owning the most innovative technology company in the world in the PAST decade than there is UPSIDE to betting on the number in roulette that has hit the most in the PAST ten turns of the wheel. The next great innovation could come from any company. Owning Apple doesn't give you any UPSIDE in that regard.
Yeah, I disagree with this completely. The idea that innovation is simply a game of chance, and that some companies aren't better positioned to innovate and more importantly, cash in on innovation, is silly.
What's your definition of innovation? This might be the problem. Is it innovating to put a touchscreen on a phone or is it innovating to create the touchscreen?
As an investor, my priority is the company that can monetize the innovation, regardless of whether the innovation was originally their brainchild.
IBM, HP, Oracle, etc... that's what they do. Not only do they monetize their own innovations, they buy other companies in order to monetize their innovations. For that to be the attraction of Apple seams, as a I said before, very HP-ish to me. And to be honest, I think it would disappoint a lot of Apple's investors if that is what Apple is now... a company that just moneizes innovation.
It's my opinion, and I know you disagree, that there are a lot of people invested in Apple because they believe Apple is on a streak of producing new, world changing innovation, and that streak is not over. My opinion, was probably more true when the stock was $700 than it was when it was $400. But given a lot of the comments in this thread, which I know is just anectdotal, there's still a lot of that mindset holding on, and I even classify you as one of them. I think you are reaching in suggesting monetizing the innovation is what you like about them, given that would make them more like HP and less like being Apple. Without new new, world changing innovation, Apple becomes another one of the hundreds of slow, steady income producing companies on the NASDAQ and NYSE, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of them are good investments. But there is a huge risk that the price of Apple right now is higher than it should be if it is now a monetizing the innovation company that both you and I believe it is, because those who believe the world changing innovation streak is not over yet are the roulette players he keep playing the same "hot" number, and they leave the table quickly when the "hot" number stops hitting.