Apple has matured and is simply far less of a true growth stock than they have been. The days of Apple stock doubling in 12 months are over, but Apple mints money as a company and really should be compared more to industrial-type stocks these days. If you could own Apple for the next 5 years and it only averaged a 5% yearly stock price appreciation with a dividend of around 2% - would you still invest? High growth investors probably wouldn't, but most everyone else would.
You can imagine fund managers making AAPL their biggest holding right now. It's the new IBM, nobody gets fired for holding AAPL. There are easier shorts.
Apple would be hard to short with any real success. Funny, I used to really like my Blackberry back in 2006. Are the technologies still evolving or have we plateaued. If they are still evolving I would bet on some of the newer smaller players stepping ahead of apple and it would happen without most fund managers anticipating it. Like IBM when you sit and hold it for years and years one morning you wake up and its old hat. Anyone ever heard of the Xiaomi. I would not bet on the small company coming out of China and bet that China botches any strong smart phone player who centers their model there... but who knows (US, Canada, Finland, Japan, S Korea all have great knowledge of cell)
As long as AAPL remains the heaviest weighted stock in the Nasdaq/S&P plus one of the higher priced stocks in the Dow (which is price weighted), it will have buying pressure, causing the stock to go UP over time, especially if it announces stellar earnings for Q4. There are two sides of every trade, and I'm on the other side. Best of luck.
116-118 before sept 9 event. To sell here as we are still very low (look at a 2015 chart) is stupid . Rise will be slow BUT steady
Who says Dow or S&P are going to go up and up and up. They have been in this mode since 2009, so down cycle is what we have entered into recently. Apple goes back up little more and I short more stocks. My mental stop is $135 or so.
I never said it would go "up and up and up" forever, I said it would go up "UP over time" and given it's a very heavily owned stock by the institutions and also owned by a large retail base, the bias is UP after the nearly 40% draw. Of course one may want to take profits at anytime on any security, given the overall volatility of the market. Although my high target is near the $130 area, I'm willing to take partial gains when it reaches the $120 area.