Category: zerohedge

Apple announces after the market close today. For my subscribers, I believe true valuation hovers around my base case scenario from the last Apple update. Of course, after we have crunched the numbers from this quarterly update we will have considerably more empirical data to munch on. As a quick review…  

• Apple 3Q2013 Valuation Update – Retail
  (Technology)
• Apple 3Q2013 Valuation Update – Pro & Institutional

Apple’s major problem is that the vast majority of its profits come from 2 products, both of which are rapidly losing market share and are outclassed by the competition in many different ways. On top of that, the competition is both undercutting on prices and outperforming on tech. That’s a bad combination for a company that relies on fat margins to sustain their share price.

 iPhone-5-vs-Galaxy-S4-Xperia-Z-Ultra

The mere diversity of the Android universe is a significant threat to Apple’s margins. Check this out…

2 40

A water-proof phone must be corny, right?

 

I know, many will say.. “But, But this is tablet, not a phone!!!” Well, if that’s the case, it competes mightily against both the iPad and the iPad mini (the mini hurts Apple’s historical margins and the iPad is dropping in both ASP and market share like a rock). We all know what follows rapid market share loss, right?

In early 2010 I warned on Blackberry (then RIMM), with market share loss to Android being the prime determinant… Many More Black Eyes for the Blackberry? A Complete Forensic Analysis of Research in Motion. I put significant data out in the public domain to illustrate my point and put explicit price points out for subscribers, ie. RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP? Was I right?

Blackberry market share vs margin correlation analysisBlackberry market share vs margin correlation analysisBlackberry market share vs margin correlation analysis

Sony Xperia Z Ultra Apple Compare

The iPhone and the iPad business franchises are still making money hand over fist, but they are also losing market share and margin – and doing so quickly…

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 The addition of (margin) mini products and iPhone 5Cs simply evidence what is obvious, the existence of products like those below are pressuing Apple and continue to eat at its hegemony…

11 xperia z ultra 271315438590382730

On top of the fact that Apple faces extreme compeition on all fronts, common business sense begs the question, Have We Reached “Peak Premium Smartphone”?

See also:

Is Tim Cook Cooked? Market Share vs Profit Margin, part 2 – Follow What I Do, Not What I Say!

  

1. Here I go again – Hardware is Dead & Samsung Agrees
2. When Berries Go Bad: BlackBerry to Slash Workforce by Up to 40% (As Predicted)
3. Samsung Follows Footsteps Of Apple, HTC, Nokia – Wasn’t That Quick?
4. Looking Through Windows To See The Big Data On Fruit – Or Android Gets ’em Again
5. iPad Shipments Decline As BoomBustBlog Time Machine Disrupts The Apple Reality Distortion Field Once Again
6. Apple Bonds Proven To Have A Nasty Taste
7. Angels, ArchAngels and Data Demons: The Smartphone Battle Is Officially Taken To The Cloud!
8. Google Has Officially Gone On Record To Confirm Reggie Middleton’s “Negative Margin Business Model” Tactics
9. Blackberries, Apples & Fruit Borne Successitis – The Problem With Excess Profits Is Hubristic Management Tends To Take Eyes Off The Prize!!!
10. Is It Time To Buy Apple As A Valuation Play? The Contrarian That Called The Top In Apple Weighs In

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/HLBPcZM9cSM/story01.htm Reggie Middleton

With ‘spies like us’ who needs enemies. With the world upset at what Obama now claims is all Bush’s doing, the installation of a new FBI Director (James Comey) may just have some irony to it; especially since the White House has specifically noted he will be making some ‘remarks’. Of course, the hope is that President Obama will use this opportunity to answer a few questions from an uninspired press corps…

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/eVFQE8d7h6E/story01.htm Tyler Durden

With ‘spies like us’ who needs enemies. With the world upset at what Obama now claims is all Bush’s doing, the installation of a new FBI Director (James Comey) may just have some irony to it; especially since the White House has specifically noted he will be making some ‘remarks’. Of course, the hope is that President Obama will use this opportunity to answer a few questions from an uninspired press corps…

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/eVFQE8d7h6E/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

This is a topic that has been on my radar screen for a while, but one that very few Americans seem to be paying attention to despite the egregious revelations concerning NSA spying that have emerged recently. I first flagged this issue in late 2012 in an article titled: Coming to Your Car: Mandatory Black Boxes That Record Everything.

The latest push for tracking devices in cars is being sold as necessary in order to raise funds to pay for the nation’s decayed highway infrastructure. For example:

As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

This is simply idiotic. There is already a tax per gallon on gasoline, so people are already being taxed based on how much they drive. Only a control-freak, moronic government bureaucrat would come to the conclusion that the solution to this problem is to install Orwellian tracking devices in people’s cars.

More from the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

 

The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.

Loath to raise the tax, so let’s put a tracking device in every car instead. I don’t even know where to begin…

As the trial got underway, the ACLU of Nevada warned on its website: “It would be fairly easy to turn these devices into full-fledged tracking devices…. There is no need to build an enormous, unwieldy technological infrastructure that will inevitably be expanded to keep records of individuals’ everyday comings and goings.”

But it’s for the highways people. You like highways don’t you? I’m sure it’ll piss off the terrorists too.

What a sad state of affairs.

Full article here.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/udQKyaHguMs/story01.htm Tyler Durden

A week ago, completely out of the blue, Bill Gross took a swipe at Carl Icahn, tweeting “Icahn should leave #Apple alone & spend more time like Bill Gates. If #Icahn’s so smart, use it to help people not yourself.” Today, Carl Icahn retaliates.

To Bill Gross @PIMCO: If you really want to do good, why not join http://t.co/nn6jp9E2ch like Gates, I and many others have?

— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) October 28, 2013

We can’t wait as this cage match between a 69 and a 77 year-old escalates and culminates with the inevitable (Im)Mor(t)al Combat fatality.

For now, our money is on the Icahnator.

More impotantly: as the bored billionaires seek Twitter exposure, it is once again popcorn time.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/OGz7sv68T3I/story01.htm Tyler Durden

One of the prevailing themes in recent weeks has been that Spain has transformed out of Europe’s economic basket case into a success story. This was further exemplified today by the following quote by DieselBOOM:

• DIJSSELBLOEM: SPANISH RECOVERY IS ON TRACK 
• DIJSSELBLOEM: SPAIN COULD BE FRONT RUNNER OF EURO-AREA RECOVERY

It could, if one listens to bureaucrats peddling snake oily hope, but certainly not based on actual dynamics in its housing market, where mortgage apps have tumbled 90% from all time highs, pocket change investment by Bill Gates notwithstanding, and where even the YoY change has now trippled dipped.

 

… and certainly not based on loan to companies or households, which continue to be the worst in the Eurogroup.

So one wonders: with a housing market deader than ever, and with loan creation that is the worst in the Eurozone, will the modest bounce in employment, which as we explained last week was all driven by a seasonal jump in temp and self-employed workers, just where is Mr. DieselBOOM and the endless ranks of Eurotopians seeing this mythical Spanish recovery? Aside from the IBEX of course, which like every other liquidity-bubble dependent indicator is merely reflecting the roughly $3 trillion in annual global liquidity injections by the world’s central banks?

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/u3f4M5dlGN8/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Last month was all ponies and unicorns as hope was extrapolated that a 19-month high in the Dallas Fed meant this time was different and not entirely cyclical as we have pointed out again and again. Once again it seems the government-budget-based hope has collapsed as even optimism for the future dropped to its lowest in 4 months. This is the biggest miss of expectations on six months and the lowest print in 5 months. Reflecting the margin pressures that we discussed previously, prices received dropped dramatically as price paid soared.

 

 

 

 

and it appears margins will remain under pressure in the futures:

Looking ahead, 39 percent of respondents anticipate further increases in raw materials prices over the next six months, while 34 percent expect higher finished goods prices.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/w_dUa8VFqxk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Despite Joe Lavorgna's seemingly gigantic cognitive dissonance in the face of this report, the pending home sales data collapsed in September (and remember this is before the shutdown and was heralded at the time as buyers rushing to buy before the risk of the shutdown slowed acceptances). Affordability, argued by some serial extrapolators as still being 'relatively' positive – has drastically weighed on housing at the margin just as we argued previously. This is the first annual drop in 29 months, the biggest drop in 40 months, and the biggest miss against expectations in 40 months. Even the typically full of spin, NAR Chief economist had to admit "this tells us to expect lower home sales for the fourth quarter, with a flat trend going into 2014." Apparently, if one is to believe the spin, overheard everywhere in September: "Hmm, government may shut down next month – let's not buy a house."

Of course, NAR Chief Economist seems to have found an excuse by time-shifting his narrative…

NAR chief economist, said concerns over the government shutdown also played a role. “Declining housing affordability conditions are likely responsible for the bulk of reduced contract activity,” he said. “In addition, government and contract workers were on the sidelines with growing insecurity over lawmakers’ inability to agree on a budget. A broader hit on consumer confidence from general uncertainty also curbs major expenditures such as home purchases.”

Umm no Larry… because in our world September is before October and no one was talking about shutdown's impact then OR even pricing it in any way…

 

 

none of this should be a surprise given the impact on mortgage activity that higher rates have had…

 

Despite all the chatter that rates are still 'near' generational lows….

Of course – the market loves this crappy data is rallying handsomely as Taper is pushed off once again.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rs1lfqMN1Bk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Doing more of what failed spectacularly will not save the day a second time, as the scale required to create yet more phantom collateral and more asset bubbles will collapse the system.

The financial storm clouds are gathering, ominously darkening the horizon. Though the financial media and the organs of state propaganda continue forecasting blue skies of recovery and rising corporate profits, the factual evidence belies this rosy forecast: internal measures of financial and economic activity are weakening across the globe as the state-central bank solutions to all ills–massive increases in credit creation, leverage and deficit spending–have failed to address any of the structural causes of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown.

This failure to address the causes of 2008 Global Financial Meltdown is disastrous in and of itself–but the status quo has magnified the coming disaster by scaling up the very causes of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown: excessive credit expansion, misallocation of capital on a grand scale, an opaque shadow banking system constructed of excessive leverage and a dependence on phantom collateral, i.e. risks and assets that are systemically mispriced to skim stupendous profits for financiers, bankers and their political enablers.

This is what I have called doing more of what has failed spectacularly.

Extremes inevitably lead to collapse, but even the most distorted system has some feedback mechanisms that attempt to counter the momentum toward disaster. Just as the body will try to mitigate the negative consequences of a diet of greasy fast food, our grossly distorted financial and political systems still retain some modest feedback loops that attempt to mitigate rising risks.

These interactive forces make it impossible to predict the moment of collapse, even as systemic failure remains inevitable. Precisely when the heart of an obese, unfit person who eats nothing but fast food will give out cannot be predicted, but what can be predicted is the odds of systemic failure rise with every passing day.

Doing more of what has failed spectacularly–inflating new asset bubbles in housing, stocks and bonds via quantitative easing, obfuscating financial skimming operations with thousands of pages of new regulations, and so on–is the equivalent of pushing an obese, unfit person to run uphill. Rather than repair the system, doing more of what has failed further stresses the system.

But even if the financial system were cleansed of bad debt and phantom collateral, the status quo would remain only partially repaired. For it's not just the financial system that has reached the point of negative return: the entire economic foundation of the developed world–credit-dependent consumerism–is as bankrupt and broken as the financial system that fuels it.

The state's response to this economic endgame is depersonalized welfare, both corporate and individual. When favored sectors can't succeed in the open market, the state enforces cartel-capitalism that enriches the corporations at the expense of the citizenry. When the cartel-state economy no longer creates paying work for the citizenry, the state issues social welfare benefits, in effect paying people to stay home and amuse themselves.

This destroys both free enterprise on the corporate level and the source of individual and social meaning, i.e. the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to one's community, family and trade/skill.

The status quo is thus not just financially bankrupt–it is morally bankrupt as well.

The status quo is as intellectually bankrupt as it is financially bankrupt. Our leadership cannot conceive of any course of action other than central bank credit creation and expanding state control of the economy and social benefits, paid for with money borrowed from future generations.

Let's take a wild guess that the obese, unfit person won't make it up the second hill, never mind the third or fourth one. The status quo responded to the financial heart attack of 2008 by doing more of what had failed spectacularly. That injection of trillions of dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, quatloos, etc. revived the global financial system in the same way a shot of nitroglycerin resolves a life-threatening crisis: it doesn't fix the causes of the crisis, it simply gives the system some additional time.

The next global financial storm is already gathering on the horizon. Doing more of what failed spectacularly will not save the day a second time, as the scale required to create yet more phantom collateral and more asset bubbles will collapse the system.

Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy all go hand in hand. There isn't just one storm gathering on the horizon–there are three, each adding force and fury to the other two.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/8MYohdIwrGY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Industrial Production data for September rose by 0.6%, beating expectations by the most in 11 months as pre-government shutdown data was ‘helped’ by a revision lower in August (from 0.4% to 0.2% growth). Manufacturing production rose only 0.1% (missing expectations of +0.3%) as gains in car makers’ output was offset by declines in comptures, furniture, and applicances. Capacity Utilization surged to 5 year highs with its biggest beat of expectations since Dec 2010. All-in-all, a strangely mixzed bag of great and dismal data once again… Good enough ‘trend’ to warrant ‘taper’? who knows… but we posit the cyclical trend remains and the government shutdown likely renegs some of this better-than-expected data when we see it.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/otc27GIG_bY/story01.htm Tyler Durden