Yowza! For the past week, we've been holding off on mentioning Apple's stock price because we didn't want to jinx anything, but at this point there's no way we can sit idly by and pretend that nothing's happening. After a fairly long stretch at hovering in the mid-thirties, AAPL started to see a slow rise-- not because Apple reported their sixth consecutive Street-beating profit, which Wall Street responded to with a big fat yawn, but rather because IBM announced better-than-expected results. Strange how the world works, hmmm? Of course, the IBM-influenced bump is nothing compared to what's been happening over the past couple of days.

See, apparently the key to stock performance is how well that stock is rated by all these analysts running around. Strangely enough, Apple's ratings are consistently quite a bit lower than one would expect for a company that's doing as well as it is. Recently, though, some of the analysts are coming around and getting past the age-old "Apple is dying" prejudice. Most recently, according to a Reuters article, the firm of Golman Sachs upgraded Apple from "market perform" to their recommended list-- which is apparently their highest rating. And that's what Wall Street pays attention to, because by the end of the day, AAPL had leaped up over four points to settle at 45.75-- within spitting distance of the year-long high of 47.31 it hit last January. Things are looking up.

We have a feeling this isn't a one-time spike like we see at the big Apple events; something tells us that a higher stock price due to an analyst upgrade is probably more of a long-term gain. Of course, we could be wrong, and there's always the jinx factor. However, we feel that the only way we could really jinx Apple's stock price would be to actually buy some AAPL. As it stands, we fulfill our duty to Apple's continued financial success by utterly refraining from owning even one share of stock, since our bad luck with money matters is legendary. If we had bought AAPL at 16, it'd currently be hovering around 12. So if you're reaping the benefits from Apple's stock performance, just remember whom to thank.