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AAPL just warned that they were going to miss revenues by $10 billion.

Gravity

No surprise, a company that hasn't had a new product in many years. How many "new" I-phones will people buy? Starting to find out.

Today, investors shrugged off damaging news from China regarding factory output. Tomorrow, if they do the same regarding the traumatic news from Apple today, then the market would most likely have to be at its nadir.

Last night futures looked dreadful, but come daylight the tide turned with all three major indices finishing in the green -stunning to say the least!

Tonight is a repeat performance, so far, with dreadful futures. What will tomorrow bring? Have investors become resilient, jumping in instead of out? Are they refusing to sell at lower prices except for the Pajama Traders scared of their own shadow?

That is a LOT of money.

Apple is failing to earn the loyalty of it's customers. It's business model is 100% based on monetizing loyalty ---- and they are not building loyalty. That's a problem.

DON'T buy high and sell low and You will be just fine.

The reason why they stopped reporting unit sales 2 months ago.

Futures are down between 1.5 and 2.5%, depending on the index. Don't have any more open buy orders in the morning than you want to fill.

Buy low and sell high.

The million dollar question is, "what is low"?

That being said, I'm still on the Iphone 5. Cracked screen. Battery sucks. It works though.

Apple, as a whole, is a precise narrative of how awful we have become as a species.


WTF is up with consuming all these resources just so you can buy the new I Potato on credit??

At a $1000 bucks a pop...

Yes, it's been a tough road these past months, however, let us not forget that the market in 2017 was up, way up, so like everyone tells you, you have to look at it in the long run. Pay yourself first and automatically save some every payday. Don't ever try to time the market; don't jump in and out and don't churn your stocks. Get an IRA or 401k Buy something like an S&P fund and let it ride. When the market is down, consider the stock 'on sale' and buy more if you can. As you can see below, the returns for the entire S&P long term are just fine.

Length of Investment:.....50 Years......40 Years......30 Years......20 Years......10 Years
Average Return............... 6.52%.........6.46%.........6.62%.........6.68%.........6.77%
Median Return.................6.30%.........6.38%......... 6.64%.........6.80%.........6.74%

I set myself up with a 401k / IRA type savings account with a S&P fund back in the mid 60's and kept that until I retired in 2008. Then I adjusted it to 2/3 S&P and 1/3 bonds and have done quite well over the last 50 years. Yes, my IRA went down in 2018, however It went up dramatically in 2017 so the averaged returns for both years was fine. So much so that the RMD withdrawals I'm forced to make now are larger than I need so I'm reinvesting some of it in non-IRA accounts.

(No, I'm not a stock broker or anything like that. I don't do flashy but rather go the slow and steady, not glamorous route in most financial things.)

When Apple has as a little talking avatar as a major selling point for a $1000+ device I personally think they’ve lost touch.

I’m convinced Apple has no male engineers who ever leave a desk, or outlet, and apparently have a man purse to carry their device.

. . . every two to three years, and you need to buy a bigger suitcase or pistol-sized holster to carry it in whenever you upgrade.

PROBABLY TIME TO REVISIT THIS............

This is meant to make you think about your retirement and your financial health. I hope it helps.

You don't need analysts in a bull market and you don't want them in a bear market. It is time to revisit some common sense for all of you in the fly-over states who will have brokers calling with the sell-this, buy-that meme as their commission runs dry up in this bear market.

Having been through a fair amount of volatility in my trading career I can only say for certain there is some massive spikes of volatility ahead. I started in this business on April 1, 1982, what a joke eh?

There is going to be a lot of pain with your money. It is coming just as sure as the lies and campaign promises of Republicans and Democrats.

Let me share some advice in a speech that I gave long ago and not too long ago. It never seems to go out of style.

I was born in 1953. That year the price of a 1st class postage stamp was 3 cents. Maybe I am old-fashioned, maybe I have been around too long, maybe I‘ve made too much money sitting in stocks over many years. You see, I’m one of those guys what believes stocks solve long-term problems. You should too. If you are like many investors maybe you turned off TV and stopped watching financial news as the market corrected back in 2000, 2001 and 2002 from the excesses of the 1990’s. I know the drivel on CNBC from the buy-this, sell-that crowd drowns out basic, common sense. To me, and probably to you, the hallmarks of a successful retirement are dignity and independence, the ability to go hunting where and when you want and the ability to meet the basic needs of life that continue to only go one way in price. Up.

Today, the average American male lives to be 78, the average female lives to 81. I know the key to financial independence, perhaps over decades of retirement is an income you can’t outlive, an income that is rising even as your cost of living continues to go up.

Personally, I think the biggest financial risk to all of us besides losing one’s money, is outliving it, which means owning the stock market is more critical today than ever before. Remember the cost of living has tripled over the last 30 years, yet few triple their income in retirement? Risk is the extinction of purchasing power. Safety is increasing your purchasing power. Last week I paid 49 cents for a postage stamp. I will bet my Lowa boots the price of stamps is only going one way. Care to guess which way the price of stamps will go?

The stock market is simply a facility for the exchange of shares. Just like the markets for fur, guns, traps or fish it is driven by supply and demand. My friends on the NYSE floor understand fear and greed better than most but they can’t tell the difference between preferred stock and livestock, they only care about payouts on commissions generated with your money, not theirs. When I last checked fear and greed hadn’t changed for around 10,000 years. Today, capitalism is the organizing principle for most of the human activity on the globe, for no one can stop capitalism. Here are 10 reasons why the United States stock market is going to continue up much like it has during your entire lifetime, (1) the U.S. has the greatest number of entrepreneurial managed companies in the world, bar none. (2) we have the leading military in the world (3) we have the leading high technology in the world in both hardware and software (4) we have the leading medical technology in the world (5)we have the leading political system in the world (6) we have 25 times more Nobel prize winners that any other country in the world (7) we create more jobs than Japan and Europe combined (8) we have 11,000 companies that trade publicly under some of the better accounting rules anywhere (9) you as an American have the freedom to accumulate wealth and extract out of life what it is you want and (10) the stock market doesn’t care who you are, what color you are, where you went to school, and, (because I grew up in the poorest county in America on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation), it doesn’t care where you came from.

Things are great and they are going to get better. I feel the 21st Century started in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Change is certain. I am one of those guys that believe you set your goals in life ahead of time. Mine includes being a free person; freedom is what this country is all about. The opportunities for success are greater now than ever before. For the first time in the history of the world all the people who are poor know they are poor. Success has nothing to do with money and everything to do with how you feel about yourself. Your net worth is your ability to function. When I was a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point postage stamps cost 8 cents and the Dow crossed 1,000 for the first time. That same year the microprocessor was invented. Today, 85% of the scientists who have ever lived are still working! When I took my degree in Economics the price of a stamp was 13 cents. Still think you don’t need exposure to the stock market?

The market is a funny place. It is the only business in the world when things are on sale, people don’t want to buy. The greatest enemy of long term investment success is not ignorance, it is fear. You see, fear leads to panic and panic breeds the inability to distinguish between temporary declines and permanent losses. When people panic they don’t discriminate. Since all market declines have been temporary and all advances permanent, we know the key to investment success is not found in intellectual babble like beta’s, standard deviations or chaos theory. It’s time in the market. Put time on your side. The single greatest thing you have going for you is time because no one can successfully forecast interest rates over the long term and no one can forecast short to intermediate term stock market moves. Long term the market always goes up, that is inevitable. But, why do investors lose in the market and why has the average mutual fund investor only averaged a small return in his mutual fund holdings?

I don’t mean to be critical, but most people invest through the rear-view mirror. They buy mutual funds after they have gone up substantially. They have bought into what I call the Sesame Street School of investing. They buy into the hottest fund, in the hottest sector, in the hottest country, from the hottest brokerage firm and the one that has the most “stars” next to it in Money magazine. Then what happens? You know the drill. They turn cold. In fairly short order, a perfectly normal market correction comes along. The cycle comes to an end. Investing like that is like enlisting in the Taliban on September 12th, 2001. Yes, you are joining the proudest fighting force in the world that day. Yes, your outfit just pulled off one of the greatest disasters of all time. But you know what? You are toast. Your obituary is written. It is all downhill. I have no wish to drive this message into the ground like a ICBM but I want to make one point very clear. Pay attention. At the end of an investor’s life, less than 5% of his total lifetime return will from what his investments did versus other investments. The other 95% will come from how the investor behaved.

You see, I have a firm belief that there is absolutely no relationship between investment performance and investor performance. Stock market success is a function of two things. One, recognition that the markets will go down and sometimes go down a lot, and two, prepare to regard those declines as either non-events or buying opportunities and never as an occasion to sell. With all certainty, I know that the most boring and mediocre stock fund in your portfolio, the one you hold onto during a vicious bear market is infinitely better than the world-class stock fund that you sell out of at the bottom of a temporary decline. The secret to making big money in stocks is to not get scared out of them. Americans, God bless them, are totally unable to distinguish between fluctuation and loss. The bottom line is this, and if you don’t believe me you have the right to be wrong, but don’t forget it, the higher your exposure to stocks as a percentage of your assets the better your overall return, over the long term. In the long run, no one controls our investment fate. We control it. Bailing out of markets is like quitting a marathon because you get tired.

nice

Don’t believe I have seen that before. Thanks for posting.

Nice read.