The most proSell Apple to
By John Shinal
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) Regular readers of this column know that I dont typically tout any tech stocks. Im not a trader and dont own individual shares of companies, so its not my job (as I see it) to tell you to buy this or sell that.
The most proSell Apple to buy LinkedIn John Shinal,As a journalist, what I try to do is give investors as much information about tech companies as I can dig up, then present it so you can make your own informed decisions.
Most of the time, I present the information in a skeptical way, for two good reasons.
Paul Vigna discusses when the short sellers might come onto the scene, along with the Goldman Sachs subpoenas related to the firms mortgage-related business. (Photo: REUTERS/Mike Sega)
First, theres a rather large investment industry out there employing tens of thousands of people and managing trillions of dollars designed with the sole purpose of selling stocks. If you want to find someone to tell you which tech stocks to buy, you wont have to look r. Adding to that din doesnt seem to be a good use of your time, or of mine.
Second, in early 2002, after watching the tech-stock bubble burst and take $7 trillion in investor cash with it, I vowed that in the future 脸上老长痘痘怎么办 The most proThe queens of, whenever I had to choose between touting the next big thing in Silicon Valley or trying to find holes in the story, Id be better serving readers by doing the latter.
Heres why: Even though I had written some of the earliest and hardest-hitting stories on Cisco Systems Inc.
when I worked for Business Week magazine at the height of the bubble, I and/or my editors had backed away from hitting even harder several times.
Throughout 1999 and 2000, it wasnt easy to write that Ciscos growth model which depended on snapping up smaller networking firms was doomed if the stock it used as currency to pay for those acquisitions stopped rising. I had one editor at that publication, whose opinion I respected and still do, tell me that the magazine had written such a story two years earlier and had gotten shredded for it, by Ciscos PR machine as well as by investors, when the stock doubled and then doubled again.
IPO would be, I insisted to my editors that we include as much skeptical information as we could, including quotes and cts that demonstrated how IPO shares,重庆平安保险. on average, tend to underperform stock markets over the long term.
Google was an exception, of course, and those who bought it with both fists during its first days, weeks and months as a public issue were rewarded with handsome gains.
All of the above is a necessary prece for what Im about to do, which is break my own rule and offer some straightforward investment advice: If you own Apple Inc.
and youre a trader (by which I mean you dont mind taking profits off the table and paying the taxes on them) rather than a buy-and-hold investor, I believe theres a strong case to be made right now to take a good chunk of those profits and plow them into shares of LinkedIn Corp.
When people start talking about market caps in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars to justify expectations that a stock still has a multiple or two left in it, you might want to think seriously about taking some money out.
Ive heard all the bullish arguments for Apple that its got the best technology in the st-growing smartphone market; that the iPhone and iPad are pulling more potential Mac buyers into stores; and that it has so much momentum the company wont miss a beat, even if Steve Jobs never returns from his medical leave. Read earlier column on Apple CEOs medical condition.
I agree with this, for the most part. But no stock goes up forever, and Apple already has had a tremendous seven-year run. Eventually, even Jobss Midas touch cant conquer the law of large numbers, and at a $312 billion market cap, Apple is carrying around a very large number. It may yet pass Exxon Mobil Corp.
to claim the top spot, but buying or holding a company at or near the top of a run isnt a prudent investment strategy.
John Shinal is a former technology editor of MarketWatch. He also has covered Silicon Valley as a reporter for Bloomberg, an editor at Forbes.com and a correspondent for BusinessWeek magazine. More recently, Shinal was managing editor of Vator.tv, then a consultant and reporter for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, where he helped launch the tech jobs Web site FINS.com in 2010.
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