Want to know who won the headlines battle? Apple and Facebook were the only two players in the game today
Dow: 13,275 (+0.19%) S&P 500: 1,418 (+0.19%)
All quiet on the Wall Street front. As the MarketSnacks faithful know from our daily summaries, it’s been a slow summer week here on the trading floor with many investors mid-daiquiri in a poolside hammock. But the twice-monthly Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index managed to get things going today and move the markets to their 6th straight weekly gain – consumer optimism rose in the first half of August despite expectations it would decline. Apple and Facebook were the 2 big names making headlines (for opposite reasons & performances) as the Dow ticked up 25 points. After weeks of sneaky steady increases in the 2nd half of the summer, the blue chip heavy index is now just shy of its 13,275 point 4-year high that was set on May 1st.
Facebook CEO finally acknowledges stock price free-fall, Apple hits another all-time high on iPad mini rumors
Facebook (FB) dropped another 4% today as investors wonder if it’s really worth billions of billions of dollars. Mark Zuckerberg told his employees today that it’s been ”painful” to watch the stock drop 50% since the IPO in May. Loads ofemployees have been given FB shares as compensation and others bought the stock post-IPO, pinning their shares to their breast pockets to fulfill the mandatory flair requirement. But now they’re watching the value plummet and they’re pissed off, particularly since they’re barred from selling their stock for a few more months due to rules preventing insiders from selling too soon. On the other side of Silicon Valley, Apple (AAPL) hit a new all-time high today at $648 on an analysis by boutique investment bank Jefferies & Co. that said the stock is worth $900/share. The report estimated an iPhone 5 would be released in September and that a smaller iPad Mini was being developed to compete with lower priced Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) tablets. These new products were promised by Jefferies to cause mass-swooning of hipsters from coast to coast to Brooklyn, to be dubbed “Apple-mania.” FYI – Apple’s now worth $607 billion.
Over the Weekend:
- PCs 4 Life! Dell and Hewlett-Packard report their second quarter earnings…they’re both expected to tank on poor PC sales
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