Accounting is something every business needs to do regardless of how little interest they may have in doing it. There are some in each group who have moved on to greener pastures and unique boutique s better suited to their investment philosophies and Apple may be benefiting from this pruning of the base. That may sound like an exaggeration, since the company is transparent about the adjustments that it made to get to its adjusted numbers and the practice it uses is widespread not just among companies, trying to better a better face on their operating results but also among analysts who track these companies. While that story may make sense for a lightly-traded, small cap company, I don’t see it holding up to scrutiny when the company that in question is the largest company in the world. Still the Covid-19 antibodies have been showing results of lasting for 6 months and so sometime before that will see folks starting to get vaccinated from the vaccine. I will believe this explanation, if I see Twitter stop using stock-based compensation, but I don’t see how they can afford to. Most of the summer months we will spend in Canada and in winter we will travel down south, closer to Mexico border.

In the months since, Apple has tried to stay the course and talk the price up, to mixed effect. Given my estimate of value of $648/share, I will continue to hold Apple but I have learned to remain vigilant. Meanwhile, SI dropped by another 2M shares to a twelve month low, and shorts couldn’t have been particularly happy about the situation they were in. Update: I updated my April 2014 valuations to reflect the current share count of 861.38 million shares, rather that the weighted average share count of 885 million shares that I had used before. There was little value effect: I revalued Apple, the day after the earnings report, and arrived at a value per share of $648, effectively unchanged from the $649 that I estimated on the day before. The latest earnings report, on April 23, in many ways, reflects Apple’s frustration with the persistent gap between price and value.

It included almost every catalyst that companies that believe that they are under valued use to attack the gap between price and value: a dividend increase, an increase in the stock buyback program and a 7-for-1 stock split. There are lots of reasons for why a gap exists between price and value (as was the case with Apple) and why it persists for long periods but I believe that that the gap is largely driven by investor psychology and market momentum, two forces that are immune to rationality. There was a price effect: While we can make the standard arguments for why the price changed after the report, i.e., that the dividends make investors feel more secure about future cash flows from their Apple stockholdings and that the stocky buybacks are a signal that the company believes that its stock is under valued, those arguments are undercut by the fact that Apple has tried both moves before, with little success in moving the pricing needle. American Intl Group, Inc. (AIG) – AIG was up nicely on Monday on news that the company reduced its Federal Reserve indebtedness slightly in recent weeks.