Yesterday was 670 points peak to trough on the Dow. That’s huge!
Here’s a little of today and yesterday. Down big. Then up big.
This gives volatility a whole new meaning.
Today we start down. Where do we go? Greece. China. Europe.
What can we do?
Suggestion: Watch Federer play Simon. It’s on ESPN2. Or it was until the rain set in.
Maybe the rain in England will stop and turn our markets up?
This gives new meaning to:
Question: What’s a guaranteed way to make a small fortune?
Answer: There’s only one guaranteed way: Start with a large fortune.
It’s working today.
What’s with Apple? It’s been pretty awful recently.
Maybe it’s because nobody is buying the Apple Watch?
This chart comes from a story yesterday on the typically bearish MarketWatch blog:
Opinion: Apple Watch sales plunge 90% (Published: July 7, 2015 11:37 a.m. ET)
Sales are far below expectations only three months after hitting shelves
Sales of the new Apple Watch have plunged by 90% since the opening week, according to a new market-research report.
Apple has been selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the U.S. since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000, according to data from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Slice Intelligence.
That is a sharp decline from the week of the April 10 launch, when Apple sold about 1.5 million watches, or an average of about 200,000 a day, Slice estimates.
Furthermore, two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit “Sport” version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549.
In an ambitious bid for the luxury market, Apple also unveiled a gold “Edition” model priced at $10,000 or more. So far, fewer than 2,000 of them have been sold in the U.S., Slice contends.
Slice bases its research on electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.
Wall Street has been desperately trying to work out how well the new watch has been selling, but Apple has been refusing to say. The company, which in the past has updated Wall Street on the sales of new products soon after the launch, has yet to release any numbers about the watch.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How worrying are these numbers for Apple investors, fans and customers? It’s a mixed picture.
On one hand, you’d expect sales of any new product to tumble after the initial bump (and the first week’s numbers are heavily weighted toward the opening day). The watch is only a tiny part of Apple’s business. Trefis, a stock-research company, ascribes just 4% of Apple’s current value to its watch business.
But this fall-off in sales, if confirmed, nonetheless looks ominous. And the Apple Watch is much more important than any immediate contribution to earnings would suggest.
The Apple Watch is the first completely new product the company has created and launched since the death of its visionary founder, Steve Jobs, in 2011. How well the watch fares may be one measure of how well Apple may be able to maintain the standards of excellence in innovation, marketing and production it achieved under Jobs. Investors are used to seeing new products, such as the iPhone and iPad, fly off the shelves as soon as they are launched.
The Apple Watch is also a foray into the world of so-called “wearable tech,” which is supposed to offer yet another big surge in product sales for Apple and its rivals in the years ahead. Once everyone has a smartphone, they are supposed to go out and get a smart watch, followed by smart eyeglasses, and so on. Or, at least, so goes the theory.
Apple’s Watch has entered a competitive market for wearable tech, against rivals such as health-monitoring wristband Fitbit (FIT).
It’s early days yet on the Apple Watch, but investors may have reason to be cautious.
Apple looks as though it’s about to break through its resistance level. Yuch.
The MarketWatch story may have a kernel of truth. Few of my friends are wearing an Apple Watch. They ask me why I like mine? I explain about “notifications.” They shake their heads and talk about something else — typically Wimbledon. They know for notifications like a hole in the head.
Harry Newton who had breakfast with a banker this morning. She worried that her investment secrets would make their way to this blog. Then she told me that her bank, in its infinite wisdom, blocked access to my blog, to this web site. Then I wondered: If the bank didn’t allow its employees to get to my web site, why should they care what I said about it? So, here for the record is what I think about their bank: I really like your bank. Your people are great. You do good work.
The sky is falling, the markets are crashing, yet they keep pounding gold. It ain’t easy being yellow.
what do you mean, “it ain’t easy being yellow.”
like being afraid?
Nah, just reflecting on the color of the metal. I went in early and have taken a shellacking.
All my apple enthusiest friends are waiting for version 2 “to get the bugs out” similar to IPad. Maybe you can get http://www.technologyinvestor.sucks for your banikng friends to get around the blockage! 😀
Since you issued your buy signal two days ago, the market is down another 60 points (NASDAQ) today. Harry, you have cost your reader(s) who follows you a lot of money this week!
Still Harry’s a brilliant and entertaining fellow. Of course, the market, since time immemorial has been and always will be a crap shoot. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Yes, but his newsletter is overpriced.
You can get around that subscription fee. I renew my free trial offer every two weeks. The back office hasn’t caught on yet.
What a hoot. I guarantee that the “investment secrets” of any of these bankers, if you follow them long enough, will eventually make you homeless. Mathematically, it’s better to hire the dart-throwing chimpanzee, as the economist Paul Samuelson pointed out way back in the early 1970s. (Unless of course, her “secret” is to buy an index fund and not subject it to any additional “expertise,” or else run a pump-and-dump scheme.)