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The Mundane Explanation (3/22/00)
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Up nearly twelve points on Tuesday, up another nine points on Wednesday-- no doubt about it, something's going on with Apple stock. Once the whipping boy of the tech market, AAPL has grown from under $13 a share to over $144 in just over two years. Geez, just look at this chart-- "up 983.14% since 12/22/97." Can you believe there are still people who think Steve Jobs doesn't deserve that Gulfstream jet? Heck, we say it's time to buy him a whole fleet. And a small country to park it on.
Now, after the sudden twelve-point rise on Tuesday, we were willing to write the whole thing off as a fluke. After all, there was no real news that should have sparked such an increase. "Steve Jobs will keynote at WWDC." Big whoop. "Palm has lots of ex-Apple executives." Bestill our palpitating hearts. No, we figured that Apple just got caught up in the overall tech stock increases, but fared better than most due to some unknown external factor-- cosmic rays, most likely. But after the price continued to skyrocket on Wednesday, we figured we just had to be missing something obvious. And apparently we weren't the only ones a bit baffled by AAPL's disproportionate run-up. MacWEEK thinks it "appears to be part of a general upswing in technology stocks," but most other tech stocks didn't fare nearly so well. The Mac Observer reports that the "recent surge comes on the heels of little or no news from Cupertino." Everybody's scratching their heads.
Everyone except the investors, that is. Faithful viewers Adam and Tom Bank both clued us in on what's probably been happening. The other day, all the Apple stockholders received their Annual Report in the mail. While there wasn't any new information in there to fervent Apple watchers, this packet brought a few interesting items to the attention of the less-Apple-addicted investors out there-- namely, the upcoming investors' meeting and the vote to increase the number of shares of AAPL from 320 million to 900 million. That means an imminent stock split, and an imminent stock split usually takes share prices higher. Anyone who tunes in to AtAT on a regular basis knew about that last month, but, much to our continued chagrin, not all Apple investors are AtAT addicts. Anyway, the Annual Report explanation is the likeliest we've yet heard for AAPL's recent success, so we're giving it a thumbs-up. At least, since we haven't noticed anyone getting all stretchy or turning into living orange rock, we'll acknowledge that the cosmic rays theory is a long shot.
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 3/22/00 episode: March 22, 2000: You can stop shaking your Magic 8-Ball; a couple of investors have the explanation for AAPL's recent sudden rise. Meanwhile, the iMac copycats may have hit their second wind, as the Supreme Court rules that product design is generally not protected by trademark law, and the government is reportedly close to accepting a settlement from Microsoft-- one that doesn't call for a breakup...
Other scenes from that episode: 2172: Prepare For Wave 2 (3/22/00) Gentlemen, start your engines-- we can only assume that the iMac cloners are preparing to imitate with reckless abandon. Faithful viewer SpaceTrucker was the first to tell us about the recent unanimous Supreme Court ruling that protects knockoff products... 2173: Inconsistent Behavior (3/22/00) Will the government never learn? The latest developments in the "Redmond Justice" case are startling, to say the least, and frankly, we're wondering where the writers are going with this. Faithful viewer Stuart Carlton alerted us to a CNNfn article about the increasing likelihood of an out-of-court settlement; you'll recall that, until now, settlement talks between Microsoft and the government were about as productive as a fish with a typewriter...
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