Apple

The quarterly Goldman Hedge Fund Trend Monitor, aka the HF groupthink update, is released, chock full of HF holding trivia, such as that should Apple ever miss its priced to absolute perfection business model, a whopping 181 hedge funds are going to suffer, and 75 HFs, who have Apple as a top 10 holding, are going to get crushed. Also, we uncover the latest top 10 hedge funds ranked by equity assets (DE Shaw, RenTec and Paulson are the new top 3, although with 2,048 and 2,669 holdings for the first two, they are now receiving 2 and 20 for their quant models which as the NYT highlighted recently no longer work). On the other end of the quant spectrum, are the traditional hedge funds, and as of Q2, the typical fund had an average of 63% of its long-equity assets invested in its 10 largest positions, compared to 30% for a typical large-cap mutual fund, 17% for a small-cap mutual fund, 19% for the S&P and just 2% for the Russell 2000. The top 5 most concentrated hedge fund holdings are AutoNation (46% of market cap held by HFs), Sears (45%), AutoZone (32%), Pactiv (28%) and Novell (27%). Also hilarious perpetual LBO candidate Radioshack has hedge funds make up 24% of its market cap. In other words, any bad news here will kill the stock price faster than a HFT can frontrun the exponential pulling of bids. On the other side, or the names most hated by hedge funds, is Brown Forman, where only 0.2% of HFs make up its market cap, followed by Roper Industries, Stericycle, Hormel, and Praxair. From a surprise upside potential perspective, Goldman estimates that the most HF-shorted names is Crown Media, which has a 99 day short interest ratiom followed by Lifeway Foods, Isramco, K-Fed Bancorp, First South Bancorp, and Costar Group. Shorts Squeezes in these names could be violent. Looking at ETFs, the biggest gross long ETF held by HFs is GLD with $8 billion in long ownership, while the most shorted is SPY with $27.6 billion in shorts, indicating that funds are now "hedging" using this proxy for the entire market. Lastly, in confirmation that hedge funds are for the most part worthless "groupthink" contraptions which merely ride a leveraged beta wave, and suck out management fees, Goldman highlights that the "Most Concentrated" basket of stocks has underperformed the "Least Concentrated" stocks materially since February 2007, confirming that HFs have actually destroyed value in both the past 3 years and YTD, by underperforming the market.

Android's market share is growing by nearly 900%, causing competing OSs and associated hardware vendors to experience negative smart phone market share gains. Many believe that Apple is not included in this category. Here I present hard evidence that Android is eating Apples along with everything else.

Several weeks ago, a spoof xtranormal cartoon went viral, in which the purchasing sequence of an iPhone (as compared to an HTC Evo) was hyperbolized, and which ruthlessly mocked the brainwashing practices of the Apple Borg collective. It was only a matter of time, before the brain trust behind the lampoon decided to focus its attention on the next group that has been ridiculed since time immemorial: the long-suffering gold bugs. Sure enough, the sequel is now out, and the process of purchasing an iPhone is now downright boring compared to the purported thought process behind buying gold. Of course, the cartoon is quite hilarious, but for all the wrong reasons, as in trying to mock those who believe that on a short/medium enough timeline, the survival rate for paper drops to zero, the video, which is sure to go just as viral, in fact proves all the concerns not just of the faceless "goldbug" collective, but of all those others who believe gold is headed much, much higher, which also includes the richest and most prominent money managers, financiers, and politicians in the world.

Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple now have to compete with free eBooks from the public libraries that play on $100 android tablets or directly from your cell phones. Is the commercial eBook/eReader business model DOA? It certainly looks like it...

If One Product Which Was Responsible for 70% of Your Earnings Was Under Assault by the Biggest Tech Companies In the World Through Potentially Better Products Entering Into an Economic Downturn, Would You Bet the Farm on That Stock at a rich PE?

It appears to be official. Apple’s iPhone is no longer the fastest growing smart phone in the world’s largest and most important smart phone market – the US! Considering the iPhone is 45% of revenues and nearly 70% of profits, Appolytes, should take notice. The Android Now Cometh!

A chart from Bespoke Investment Group demonstrates why Steve Jobs better pick his words very, very carefully. As AAPL accounts for a 20.1% weight in the Nasdaq, and is an HFT darling, as well as having every analyst on Wall Street loving it, should this stock tumble, we expect an 80 point ES drop in the market by EOD.

The iPhone 4, arguably Apple's most important launch since the original iPhone in 2007, may very open the door to competition that Apple doesn't want and very well may have a problem pushing back if they get their foot in the door.

The storm in a teacup that has been Apple's little fiasco with the antenna issue on the new iPhone is becoming sufficiently threatening that more people are starting to pay attention. After Apple flatly denied empirical evidence that the phone's antenna system was corrupt, and insinuated that it was really just a software glitch which could be fixed with a simple software upgrade, today's news that Consumer Reports has confirmed that a hardware flaw is creating a reception problem, and as a
result, saying it has decided not to recommend the
phone, is a huge slap in the face for Steve Jobs and the iFad team, which have now been publicly outed as liars. Obviously the issue is not about the antenna - Apple's fans, like all good lab animals, will habituate to holding the phone with tweezers, chopsticks and a heat glove if it means they get to look cool in public. However the public response by Apple to being outed that even the greatest fad creating company in the world could create a new product failure, has been a royal gaffe. Has Jobs lost enough credibility to it being material to the stock? Probably not, although fans of fads are known to turn from docile lambs to vicious hyenas once a tipping point is reached, and it suddenly becomes cooler to actually hate Apple. Today's development may have just tipped the scales just a little in the wrong direction.

This is an excerpt from part two of a multi-part series on the companies vying for dominance during the 3rd major paradigm shift in personal and enterprise technology over the last 30 years. This one will be a biggie (not smalls) and promises to create an investment behemoth out of the winner and relegate the losers to relatively niche markets. This is saying a lot considering the size of the companies participating in the battle for the pole position. I created this series to provide a truly objective, truly informed, and truly analytical (from an empirical perspective) knowledge source on this very important intersection in personal computing and distributed media.

A hands on analysis behind what the coming wars between the Apple IPhone/Ipad, Google/Android, and Microsoft/Windows means to the technology business, the (fortunate) consumer, and the future of computing. The next Microsoft is about to be borne, and its a good chance it may not be Microsoft this time around.

Now that the Prop Desk traders at GS are on edge, they are starting to bully their clients again with time tested "Shank and Crank" operations to shake everyone out of various stocks. No doubt, attempting to get the money train going again before they are litigated out of business.

To all who trade this manipulated lunacy, you have our sympathies. A 1% market move equates to well over $100 billion in market capitalization. And this value just materialized because Apple stock will (allegedly) be $50/share instead of $200, so the quadrillions in cash on the sidelines can buy buy 4 shares where before they could buy one. Just brilliant. Goldman/JPM/33 Liberty just raped everybody for lunch. And to complete the lunacy, this just made top Bloomberg news. The absurdity is just surreal. In other news, the Greek revolution will be televized in 1 minute YouTube 360x240 mp4 clips via iPhone.

Extremely volatile action: assorted Atari system short circuiting with no benchmark to compare results against.

Blowout quarter, with $3.67 in EPS ($3.50 estimates), on $15.7 billion in revenue ($14.96bn consensus) . Apple sold 3.36 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 8.7 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 100 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 21 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Apple had $7.6 billion of cash as of December 31, up $2.4 billion from a year ago, although coupled with a decline in marketable securities from $18.2 billion to $17.1 billion.