Another day, another analyst upgrade, another record for Apple's stock. It's almost getting boring, isn't it? For instance, after AAPL closed at a new all-time high last Friday, analysts William Shope and Charlie Wolf of Warburg Dillon Read found themselves compelled to raise their price target. (Leaving it at a paltry $75 a share would have seemed a little odd, especially given that AAPL closed at over $73 last week.) So now Will and Charlie have set the bar at $90 a share, and we can only hope that Apple's up to the challenge. There's a neat CBS MarketWatch article on this whole rosy situation, which includes a handy little fourteen-year chart showing Apple's stock doing better now than it ever has in the past.

The analysts' reasoning behind the target increase? Oh, it's the usual suspects-- the probable grand slam known as the iBook, the industry buzz over the new G4, the likelihood of a "refreshed" iMac sometime within the next couple of months, etc. Wall Street reacted favorably, as AAPL rose almost another three points to close at over $76 a share, after reaching almost 78 during the day. Honestly, at this point we've given up any hope of ever predicting where things will level off. We thought price-taking would have knocked a few points off and broken the momentum long ago. Which is, of course, why we're not day-traders over here in the AtAT trenches.

But like we said, while this is great news for Apple and its stockholders, it's really getting kind of boring. Not that a dizzying thirty-point drop would make us happy-- it wouldn't. But at least it'd give us something exciting to talk about. After all, we're not shareholders, so we wouldn't be losing anything from such a precipitous nosedive, and we'd probably get a guilty charge out of seeing all those "I struck it rich" AAPL investors squirm just a little. But fear not; the nosedive won't happen, and the simple reason why is this: we at AtAT aren't investors. If we owned a couple hundred shares of Apple stock, we can pretty much guarantee AAPL would be in the toilet by now; that's just our financial luck. So by not buying AAPL at $16 a year and a half ago, we virtually guaranteed its meteoric rise and fivefold increase. If you're awestruck by your appreciation of our supreme sacrifice for the good of the platform, don't applaud-- just throw money.