Playing Apple stock ahead of the september 9th event

 

 

  • Apple’s annual product announcement is tomorrow
  • Most analysts are focused on the iPad Pro or iPhone 6s
  • The speculative play revolves around Apple TV’s becoming an Internet of Things hub
  • Early in this decade, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPLApple (NASDAQ: was the most talked-about, and speculative, stock on Wall Street. The death of Steve Jobs in 2011 was followed by a rapid rise for the Apple stock, and then a sickening fall, one that enabled smart investors to get in at about $400 ($60 after the 2014 stock split) a little over two years ago.

    Those days are gone. CEO Tim Cook had begun returning capital to shareholders in 2012, with a dividend and massive stock buybacks that in time even included taking out loans for dividends, a tax-advantaged repatriation of some of Apple’s massive overseas cash hoard.

    Since Apple was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average in March, however, the stock has faced continuing selling pressure, as falls in the Dow required mutual fund managers to sell Apple shares. The Apple stock currently trade at about 15% less than at what they did when it joined the average.

    Despite all this, a lot of people still like to play the company’s annual product announcement, scheduled for tomorrow. It will be available as a live stream, on Apple devices, meaning PC and Android users will be getting the news secondhand.

    What Will Apple Announce?

    The big announcement is expected to be an iPad Pro, an effort to create a replacement cycle for Apple’s popular tablet with up to 128 Gbytes of memory, a 13 inch screen, and a wireless keyboard that makes it a complete PC replacement, priced similarly to current MacBooks. What matters is whether third-party software companies follow-up with applications that take advantage of, and even require, this level of memory and screen capability. That won’t be known for some months.

    But if you’re considering an investment in Apple stock – and I wouldn’t recommend you buy with less than a three-year time horizon – you will want to focus on Apple TV. It was originally sold as a set-top box for watching TV, and many of the rumors today focus on whether Apple will create a Netflix-like over-the-top programming service for it. There’s also a lot of talk about the Apple TV’s gaming capabilities, the idea being that it can be a console competitive with the Sony (NYSE:SNESony (NYSE:  PlayStation or Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFTMicrosoft (NASDAQ: XBox.

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