I'm no financial analyst...quite amateur actually.

Got lucky and threw some money I had sitting into savings into AAPL last week (better late than never). Not much...just a few shares. They just announced a pretty big dividend and a stock buy back program. Sent the stock up today.

After hours they announced they've sold 3 million ipads in 3 days -- not including pre-orders (supposedly). Should send it even higher tomorrow.

Wouldn't be surprise to see it at $700 by the end of the month, and $1k by year's end.

Might be worth a look!

*not financial advice*

Any one else play the amateur investment game?

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well the economy can't be that bad if all those assholes can afford to waste their money on the next level IPad. I did finally get the iphone, but there is no way in hell i'm upgrading until my plan gives me the credit.

Have had it since 410ish.

It's getting a little rich.

Look for a selloff after quarterly window dressing.

May sell covered calls on the April 600s.

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Pullback today. Good time to buy more?

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It's what Steve would have wanted.

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r n

RIP

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I've seen analysts predict the price to touch $900. I don't know that there is a better positioned company out there. Even without leveraging their capital structure they have an ROE of 42%, so it's basically driven by profit margin and asset turnover, which is what you want to see. In theory, and assuming the dividend and share buyback were one offs, then they can conceivably sustain a growth rate of about 42%. But they'd need to reinvest and stop hoarding the cash.

My concern with Apple is can they maintain their level of innovation? Steve Jobs (RIP) was the ultimate marketer and knew what we wanted before we even knew we wanted it. It's too early to tell with Cook, but if they can't continue to innovate I would guess they'd start growing through horizontal (Not vertical through the supply chain) acquisitions. That is where I would hop off the train because it would signal to me that they're entering the mature stage and their acquiring for growth. I'd prefer to see them continue to grow organically through new products and new markets (obviously).

The ride will end, it always does, but I think Apple has a few more years of accelerated growth if they can continue to figure out what us consumers really want. Eventually they'll have to do more than come out with the incremental changes to the iPhone and iPad and give us something new. Otherwise the product will start to get stale as we get tired of shelling out another $300 for a few upgrades.

So will it hit $900? $1000? It very well could. But the market is irrational, so who really knows?

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"We cannot let Josh Cribbs do what he has done to us time and time again in the past, we've been dead indians in his cowboy movie enough." - Coach Tomlin

I'll second the innovation concerns, post-Jobs. I'm typing this on my iPad, while getting texts on my iPhone, while watching stats of the Pens game on my MacBook Pro. I mention this because I'm a tech geek who HATED Apple as recently as 4 years ago. I thought their hardware was horribly overpriced, and software sub-par. Then I had a coworker let me use his MacBook Pro for a full day and I realized what Jobs' vision was really about. It wasn't about the most Gigahertz or Gigabytes, or which device looks the best in a spreadsheet comparison, it was about the best cumulative user experience. Soon after that, I bought my own MacBook Pro and still love it as much as I did 3 years ago, and my collection of Apple products has continued to grow ever since.

Let's hope that Jobs instilled enough of that vision into the rest of that company for it to persist.

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Jobs left 4 years of new products in the pipeline. If 2015/2016 roll around and Apple suddenly starts faltering, you'll know why.

I'm thinking I'll sell at the end of April sometime after their Q2 earnings. Unfortunately, I invested cash I can't afford to keep in there much beyond late April, so hopefully it's around 800 by then.

My very amateur guess is that it's going to continue upward at ~1% a day for the next month, putting it in the 700s, and then propel into the 800s after strong Q2 earnings. It'll stabilize a little bit -- maybe move back down into the mid 700s, before the iPhone 5 + Q3 earnings come out, sending it back above 800. If they announce their Apple branded television set this year, they'll hit 1000. I think next year will be interesting, however. I don't see iPad sales keeping pace on a year to year basis like they have been. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple introduce some sort of smaller and cheaper iPad and iPhone for those who want to jump into tablets but can't necessarily afford.

One of these years, Apple product fatigue is going to set in. I see very early signs of that happening now, if based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence (more friends than usual switching to Android, and considering switching to an Android phone when I can).

But if Apple tackles new markets (budget tablets, television set), that could all change.

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Siri right now seems very beta. The fact that it wasn't in iPad3 was telling. I'm thinking AppleTV will be great, but they're going to have to perfect the voice software a lot more. So things may be delayed a bit on new products.

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