Apple's investors are starting to breathe a tiny sigh of relief, as the company's stock price finally hovers in the $21 range; granted, that's just slightly off its split-adjusted yearly high of $75 or so, but hey, it's a big step up from that $13 it was flirting with some weeks back. The poor folks who bought in at $70 probably aren't smiling yet, but seeing as we got in at an average buying price of just over $16, we're feeling a smidgen more relaxed these days. Of course, since we're trading online and it's all just numbers on a screen instead of green pieces of paper multiplying or vanishing before our eyes, there's a certain liberating detachment at work, here, anyway-- it's kind of like playing with Monopoly money. Ah, the wonders of the modern world! Ain't technology grand?

Anyway, now that AAPL looks like it might finally be making the long, tough trudge back uphill, we're a bit more comfortable discussing the factors that sent it plummetting to its apparent doom in the first place. Yeah, there's the obvious stuff like those earnings warnings and the quarter-billion-dollar loss, but we thought we detected some other kind of resistance that was dragging Apple's price down. Unfortunately, we lack even the most basic skills or knowledge to unearth what this possible external force might be. Heck, we barely know what P/E ratio is. (Yes, the AtAT staff invests online while possessing only the merest shred of understanding about how the stock market works; us with an Ameritrade account is not unlike a chimp with a loaded gun.)

Luckily, there are others who do understand this arcane market-type stuff, and one of them seems to think that Microsoft is partially to blame for Apple's depressed stock price. Remember back in 1997, when Bill Gates's Big Giant Head appeared on the projection screen at Macworld Expo Boston and announced that Microsoft would be investing $150 million in preferred Apple stock? Well, according to faithful viewer Rodg, Microsoft appears to have exercised its option to convert that preferred stock into common stock-- and dumped almost all of it over the course of the past few months. We're talking about tens of millions of shares, people-- something like a whole twentieth of all shares outstanding. That much selling certainly sounds like it could drive AAPL's price through the floor, doesn't it?

Rodg has posted his complete analysis and reasoning over at The Motley Fool, and while most of it is Greek to us, heck, we think the guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about. If he's right, there are a couple of bits of good news, here... the first is that Microsoft doesn't own much more Apple stock to dump, so if all that selling indeed helped to keep AAPL down, that's one fewer hurdle to clear. The other is possibly even more uplifting: had Microsoft kept that common stock, it sounds to us like Bill's boys would have had a 5% voting stake in Apple, which is a scary thought. Instead, it was sold to people like... well, like us. And we promise not to vote like Bill with our massive 0.00009% stake in the company.