It never fails. If we're not mistaken, for the past seven consecutive profitable quarters, Apple has announced end-of-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street's expectations-- prompting an immediate and inexplicable reduction in Apple's stock price. We're not even going to try to understand just what the heck is going on in the minds of investors when that happens; we've just accepted the fact that when Apple's doing better than everyone thought, AAPL loses a few points. We're guessing it's some kind of karmic alignment/cosmic balance thing, but that's as far as we plan to take that analysis.

This quarter's different, though. Weeks ago, Apple issued the infamous earnings warning which stated that Q4 profits would be significantly lower than the analysts had originally expected, mostly because, and we quote, "Motorola is even slower than the Windows 2000 development team on quaaludes." (Note: okay, that may not be an actual Steve Jobs quote. In fact, we suspect that Steve's exact words on the subject probably aren't even remotely fit for a family-oriented show like this one.) That warning had the expected effect: it sent Apple's all-time-high stock price of over 80 crashing down to the high 50s. See, we get that. That makes sense. Company doesn't do so well, company's stock loses value. We're on board with that.

But now, on the eve of Apple's final Q4 earnings announcement (you did enter the Beat The Analysts contest, didn't you? If it's before 2 PM EDT on Wednesday, there's still time! Hurry!), we can't help but notice that Apple's stock has been rising again. On Tuesday it peaked at over 69, before finally closing at nearly 68. A Wired article attributes this trend to investor confidence in Apple next quarter, which is all well and good, but we're more concerned with the "Apple beats Street, stock price plummets" syndrome. So here's what we're wondering: if Apple's actual results are lower even than the $75 to $85 million they predicted in their own earnings warning-- or, say, lower than the revised analyst consensus of 45 cents per share-- will their stock go up? We ask purely in the interest of science, of course. Guess we'll wait and see...