
January 14, 2008: The day the market lost faith in Apple - mbateman
http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/12/remembering-january-14-2008-the-day-the-market-lost-faith-in-apple/
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mdwrigh2
Also potentially relevant, from the article's comments.

Eric D. : "Steve Jobs looked thinner during that presentation than we'd seen
him before. And over the next few months, he lost more weight. The market,
rightly or wrongly, believes Apple's fortunes are tied to Jobs.

You mean Android hegemony, right?"

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brudgers
> _" I’m hoping someone can explain this because to me it makes no sense."_

It might be because 2008 was a letdown to the press compared with 2006 (Intel)
and 2007 (iPhone). The press was looking for a major new products and
significant improvements to existing product lines - see:
[http://gizmodo.com/343246/what-to-expect-at-
macworld-2008-an...](http://gizmodo.com/343246/what-to-expect-at-
macworld-2008-and-why-we-think-it-will-be-bigger-than-usual)

Sure the Air generated some buzz, but importantly the Gizmodos of the world
were predicting it would be "Bigger than Usual" The big news came later in the
year with the Appstore and Apple was moving towards announcing new products in
the summer rather than at the new year (this New Year's announcement wasn't
even made by Apple but by Verizon).

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tjarratt
Too bad the press didn't get the memo that the iphone SDK would, in time,
provide plenty of news.

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brudgers
If development tool releases were newsworthy, the Techcrunch would be so busy
writing about Microsoft you would rarely see anything about Apple.

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6ren
It's typical for the stock of high-growth companies to be harder hit in a
recession (a higher _beta_ ).

This doesn't explain the time of onset of the trough, but contributes to its
depth and breadth. They are likely several factors.

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KaeseEs
I'm more curious about the cause of the steep walled canyon of P/E lousiness
from mid-October of '08 that lasted almost exactly a year.

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gbhn
The article discusses this: it was the earnings collapse of the rest of the
S&P500 during the deep recession. This collapse didn't hurt Apple
proportionately, but since their stock dropped off quite a bit despite that,
their P/E was way down relative to the rest of the S&P500. (3x cash on hand at
one point, the author says, which is pretty crazy)

