Apple or IBM: 1 year later

AAPL IBM May 9th 2017

1 year ago I sold 100 shares of IBM and bought 100 shares of Apple. I chose wisely!

IBM And Its Deceiving Dividendhttps://t.co/0WLUeVrnNC

— James Peet (@jrpeet) May 8, 2018

IBM or Apple? Revisited at 4 Months

4 months ago

Comments: Will IBM ever turn around?

IBM or Apple? Which would you buy and why?

IBM and AAPL are basically at parity in price (a little more than $ 15,000 for a round lot). So presuming equal parity (hypothetical to be sure but they are close), given either of these choices (and you MUST invest the $ 15K and it must be in one or the other, which would you buy and why?

See my comment for my view but be sure to add your own

Bad Day at Black[berry] Rock

Did Apple and IBM just kill BlackBerry?

Excerpt:

Apple (AAPL) and IBM (IBM) announced a partnership that will let Big Blue offer souped-up iPhones and IPads to corporate customers. Shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) plunged nearly 12% Wednesday on the news

Comment: Image Source. What I've learned about Blackberry at work: workers don't want them! When I replaced my company phone this year, I was offered (and it was pushed hard!) a Blackberry. I took a dumb phone instead. Upper execs have IPhones. I use my own personal IPhone for business calls when out of office.

The Apple stock split and even lot trading

Who Cares What Apple's Stock Price Is?
Excerpt:

... if the split doesn't have any economic impact, why bother? I've seen two explanations. One is that doing this will probably get Apple included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Who cares about round lots? Historically, "trading commissions for odd lots are generally higher on a percentage basis than those for standard lots," and I suppose someone somewhere is still being charged extra to trade odd lots. But in the real world, it costs $9.99 to trade one or six or 100 or 10,000 shares of any stock; that is the price to trade stock, it has nothing to do with lots.4 Your cost to buy 100 shares of New Apple for $8,000 is the same as your cost to buy 14 shares of Old Apple for $8,000: $8,009.99. But round lots do matter, for market structure reasons. Odd lots -- orders of fewer than 100 shares -- are treated differently under the Securities and Exchange Commission's national market rules. They are not part of the national best bid or offer, and are not "protected orders" under Regulation NMS ...

The higher the dollar price of a stock, the more odd-lot trades there will be, and the wider the spread will be.8 So high dollar prices pretty directly take money from investors and give it to high-frequency traders. Now, like so many of the concerns that people have with high-frequency trading, this is a pure issue of market structure. The SEC could solve it in various ways, perhaps by getting rid of Regulation NMS entirely, or more simply by "protecting" odd lots. This recent BlackRock white paper calls for the latter solution

Comment: Interesting. Most of my trades are odd-lots. Image source

Sliced Apple - 7 to 1 Stock Split

Apple expands buybacks by $30 billion, OKs seven-for-one stock split

Apple Expands Capital Return Program to Over $130 Billion - Board of Directors also Approves Seven-for-One Stock Split

Excerpt:

The Board of Directors has also announced a seven-for-one stock split. Each Apple shareholder of record at the close of business on June 2, 2014 will receive six additional shares for every share held on the record date, and trading will begin on a split-adjusted basis on June 9, 2014.

Comment: Kathee to me ... "Well now we can maybe get to 100" (We have 11 pre-split shares). Image source. Investors happy ... see aftermarket trading below (Up $ 41):

Apple tanks - Check out Afterhours!

Apple Plunges $50 On Short Revenue -- Bye Bye Cook, Hello Ivey
Excerpt:

Apple (AAPL) reported financial results after Wednesday’s market close that fell short of expectations. In after-hours trading the stock is down $32. And this raises questions about whether Apple, under its former supply chain guru, has lost its ability to innovate.

Comment: Glad I just have 1 share! Better Times

Some people want an IPhone

iPhone 5, Dividend Payout Will Keep Investors Buying Apple

Excerpt:

Apple (AAPL) is testing April highs today on news that the soon-to-be-released next generation iPhone is driving down prices of the iPhone 4S at several national retailers. Investors, however, have not been scared off by the high share price and are buying in anyway, so Breakout welcomed Brian Sozzi, chief equities analyst at NBG Productions, and asked if there is anything that will frighten them out of the stock.

"I can see a world where you can just continue to buy the stock," says Sozzi, "because you got that dividend check. You're gonna want to go buy more Apple in front of key product launches. The stock could just continue to go higher."

Breakout's Jeff Macke argues that there was nothing wrong with what Apple was doing pre-dividend and "for the first time in their life they actually need cash to develop new product, and they're giving it to me" instead.

Comment: Saturday Kathee asked me what I wanted for my birthday ... I said 1 share of AAPL. I'm happy with the dumb simple one function (make and receive calls) phone that my company has provided me. When I retire, I'm going to have a dumb phone. I don't want to pay for the Smartphone dataplan. I don't need to be that connected.