How I’m trading Apple into tonight’s earnings report and other quick shots
Here’s what I was reading and thinking about this morning when I wasn’t working on my upcoming series of articles called “Get GE and JP Morgan off welfare and we’ll talk about ending the Occupy Wall Street protests”. The people at Occupy Wall Street are the capitalists, despite the panicky propaganda from both the right and left claiming otherwise.
Wall Street All-Stars on Apple’s Upcoming Earnings Call – Feet to fire, I’d expect AAPL to get hit in tomorrow’s trading even as it will report another stellar growth quarter. I’m not changing my positioning of this, still one of my largest positions, but unless the iPad numbers are 30% or more higher than expectations, I’d expect the recent big rally in this stock has probably priced in a lot of the knowns, including the incredible 4 million units moved of the iPhone 4S last weekend.
Q3 ’11 earnings in full swing this morning – And this is partly why I’m a bit concerned about how Apple will trade tomorrow regardless of how good their report is tonight. Other than Google GOOG (which readers from last week know we caught big time to the upside on its pop), there’s been a whole lot more selling off on “good” reports than popping overall this quarter. We must let the markets help guide us how to trade no matter our overall bullish underpinnings, and that’s got me looking more to the short side for earnings reports opportunities than to the long side. That is, I’d probably rather be short than long into most earnings reports this week, despite being overall bullish about earnings and stocks into year-end.
Worries grow over corporate earnings – As a contrarian, I wish I saw more headlines like this and the Economist’s “How to invest in troublesome times” headlines and fewer like this and Barron’s “Buy now” headlines.
B. of A. swings to profit and Goldman loss is second since its IPO – Subscribers know I recently added a trading long in BAC and GS as hedges to my long-term and very profitable shorts in Wells Fargo and LPS. Both reported this morning and neither report gives me any confidence that these companies have competent management or even profitable business models sans continued welfare and legalized accounting gimmicks. Nonetheless, I plan to hold these two as hedges and trading longs for a few more weeks or probably a couple months at least.
RIM announces new BBX platform – Oh, RIMM. QNX, BBX, WTH? These guys have destroyed a once great franchise/platform with their seemingly endless incompetence. The stock, as I’ve been saying since it got down here in the low 20s, is finally too cheap to short but probably not a good long. Today’s overly hyped Blackberry (non-) event about this new platform is just the latest stupid move by the company.
