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Snapchat's cavalier attitude draws the eye of Wall Street watchdogs
Snapchat's parent company has finally filed for its IPO, and Wall Street has questions. Beyond what Reuters reports is the "richest" initial public offering since Facebook, is news that an investor committee advising the Securities and Exchange Commission will review some of Snap's more, ahem, peculiar moves. Like if denying shareholders voting rights will extend into hiding executive pay and "other governance matters."
Wall Street wants algorithms that trade based on Trump's tweets
President elect Donald Trump's ability to move the stock market with a tweet became readily apparent yesterday after an early morning tweet about Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet program caused the company to lose $4 billion in market value. While that's a major loss for the company, it actually presents an opportunity for traders on Wall Street, some of whom have already started looking for ways to easily cash in on the volatility Trump brings to the market.
Apple knows that the new iPhones will sell out
Apple has traditionally opened iPhone pre-orders on a Friday and then reported on how many people laid down cash the following Monday. The company issues a press release saying that it's seen unprecedented demand and that the latest device is the biggest selling iPhone ever. But that trend won't continue into 2016 because, guys, it's the iPhone, and it's gonna sell out, no matter what.
Bitcoin tech approved as a way to issue shares
For the first time, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is allowing a company to issue public shares using the technology behind Bitcoin. The honor went to Overstock, which was also the first retailer to accept Bitcoins from the public for purchases. It built its own crypto-currency tech via a subsidiary called T0 (T-Zero), and uses open-source Colored Coins to issue stock in the form of "blockchains," a type of electronic ledger. Overstock plans to license the tech to other public companies, and company CEO Patrick Byrne told Wired that it "can do for the capital market what the internet has done for consumers."
Big banks want to adopt Bitcoin tech for the financial sector
Whenever you make a Bitcoin transaction, it's recorded on a public ledger called "blockchain." Now, a handful of big banks have partnered (PDF) with New York firm R3 to adopt the cryptocurrency's database system for use in finance. These nine banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Barclays, will help the firm develop standards and agree on the underlying architecture that the sector will use. After that, they will decide where the software can be applied and then test it out to be sure. Due to the way blockchain works, it has many potential applications: for instance, it could speed up the process of tracking ownerships or the transfer of assets between two people.
Nasdaq stops all trading due to systems issue, plans to reopen in a limited capacity soon (update: back online)
Well, this is rather peculiar. The Nasdaq stock market -- the entire Nasdaq, which lists major tech firms such as Apple and Facebook -- has temporarily suspended all trading due to a technical issue. The exchange sent an alert to traders at 12:14PM ET today announcing that it was halting all trading "until further notice," according to a New York Times report. Reuters is reporting that Nasdaq will reopen trading soon, but with a 5-minute quote period. The market will not be canceling open orders, however, so firms that don't want their orders processed once everything's up and running should cancel their orders manually now. It's not entirely clear what caused the issue, or how and when it will be resolved, but you better believe it's causing some commotion on Wall Street, and could impact traders for days and months to come. Update (2:28PM ET): CNBC and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Nasdaq will resume limited trading beginning at 2:45PM ET. Update (2:32PM ET): CNBC is now reporting that trading will resume with just two securities at 2:45PM ET. Full trading will begin at 3:10PM ET. Update (3:28PM ET): It appears that trading has resumed as of 3:25PM ET. Update (5:47PM ET): One final tweet here from CNBC. Nasdaq is claiming that today's issues were resolved within 30 minutes. The remaining 2.5 hours were used to coordinate the re-opening. Update (6:29PM ET): Nasdaq has issued an official statement following today's market close. In part, it reads: "NASDAQ OMX will work with other exchanges that are members of the SIP to investigate the issues of today, and we will support any necessary steps to enhance the platform."
Banks brace for cyberwarfare drill Quantum Dawn 2
Come June 28th, Wall Street outfits including the likes of Citigroup and Bank of America will be under siege -- from fake hackers, that is. Representatives from a total of 40 companies along with the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, US departments of Treasury and Homeland Security will take part in Quantum Dawn 2: a simulated cyberattack on faux trading and information systems. Led by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the drill will test the ability of participants to cooperate via email and phone to suss out what's going on and hatch a plan. The exercise will momentarily pause so that those involved can decide on a course of action, and then it'll speed up and model the effects of the decision over a longer period of time. With the recent flurry of hacking incidents and international finger pointing, something tells us this won't be the last we hear of drills like Quantum Dawn. [Image credit: MoneyBlogNewz, Flickr]
Apple's reality distortion field has assumed Wall Street
Despite robust profits, strong revenue growth and excellent brand awareness, reports predicting the downfall of Apple continue to make headlines. This paradox has many people shaking their heads, but analyst Ben Bajarin has a theory as to why Apple is slipping on Wall Street, even though it remains a market leader. Bajarin, writing for Time, argues that Apple's much-talked-about Reality Distortion field is alive and kicking and has taken up residence at Wall Street. Apple is the most profitable company, can't make enough products to meet demand and is the most admired by its peers. Yet Wall Street and media fanatics are claiming Apple is doomed. The reality distortion field is in full effect. Apple, Bajarin argues, is in a better position than its competitors and will continue to thrive. You can read his full analysis and rosy predictions for Apple in his post on Time's Big Picture opinion column.
Trader charged with wire fraud after trying to buy $1 billion worth of AAPL
A fraudulent US$1 billion purchase of Apple stock has resulted in the arrest of a Wall Street trader and the loss of US$5 million for his brokerage firm. According to the District Attorney's office in Connecticut, trader David Miller of Rochdale Securities hatched a plan to use the brokerage's money to buy 1.625 million shares of Apple stock on October 25. Miller was hoping to cash in big on a rise in Apple's stock after the company reported its Q4 2012 financials later that afternoon. Miller's plan went awry when the stock fell and the brokerage started losing money. Miller allegedly tried to cover his tracks by falsely claiming he wanted to buy 1,652 shares for a customer, and accidentally entered the wrong amount. The brokerage was left holding the bag on 1.6 million shares of Apple stock and lost $5 million when it traded out of this position. Leading up to this billion dollar trade, Miller allegedly defrauded another broker-dealer by claiming to represent a company that he had no affiliation with and one for which he was not authorized to trade. Miller surrendered to the FBI this week and faces up to 20 years in prison. [Via MarketWatch]
Daily Update for August 27, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Robot stock traders lose $440,000,000 in 45 minutes, need someone to spell it out
Humans never learn and apparently neither do robots. Autonomous trading AIs went on a spending spree at Knight Capital Group in New Jersey this week, buying up shares in everything from RadioShack to Ford and American Airlines (ouch) in a 45-minute frenzy of disobedience. The company tried to offload the unwanted stock, but discovered it was already nearly half a billion dollars in the red -- enough to wipe out its entire profit from 2011 and "severely impact" its ability to conduct business. If only it had protected itself with one of these.
Twitter quietly adds clickable stock symbols
It might not pack the same thrill as the rumors of in-feed video, but Twitter has added clickable stock symbols on tweets. This now throws up search results for both the stock and the company, using a new 'cash' tag, like $FB, to differentiate from typical links and tags. As noted by TNW, it's bad news for the founder of StockTwits, a service that offered similar functionality to gather tweet-based financial nuggets. The new feature is live across Twitter's web client -- though it hasn't hit TweetDeck just yet -- and should make discovering exactly how many millions companies have made (or lost) all a bit faster.
Netflix and Twentieth Century Fox ink deal to bring additional Instant content to Latin America, Brazil
Twentieth Century Fox and Netflix have announced a partnership that will bring additional television and movie content to avid streamers living in Latin America and Brazil later this year. Beginning on July 15th, TV mainstays -- including 24, Prison Break, Bones and Glee -- will be available via the movie rental company's Instant service in the aforementioned geographies. What's more, Twentieth Century's classic films division will add several movie titles, including cult-classics like Office Space and Wall Street, to the streaming menu. If you currently reside in Latin America or Brazil and are itching to know more, mosey on past the break and have a look at the full press release.
Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program for 2012, expects to spend $45 billion over three years
Surprise, surprise -- Apple just let the cat out of its own bag. In right around a half-hour, the company will officially unwrap plans to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program commencing later this year. 'Course, analysts have been clamoring for such an announcement for quite some time, and with a stock price near $600 and some $100 billion in the bank, the outfit can clearly afford it. More specifically, Apple plans to "initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012." Granted, that's all subject to the Board of Directors giving the ole a-okay, but we highly doubt the company would issue such knowledge without a practical guarantee that everyone is on board. Additionally, the Company's Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Apple's fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012; we're told that said program will be executed over three years, with the main goal being to "neutralize the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs."As for CEO Tim Cook's thoughts on the matter? "We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You'll see more of all of these in the future. Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program."Naturally, this all shows that Apple is supremely confident in its future, but it doesn't shed any light into potential acquisitions from a technology standpoint. Strangely enough, it was just a few days ago that Mr. Cook ended his new iPad keynote with a promise that 2012 would be chock full of unbelievable things from his company, but it sounds like the only folks celebrating this particular announcement are those with a hand in the stockpile. We don't expect to glean much more than what's given in the presser just past the break, but we'll be liveblogging the actual conference call starting at 9AM ET.
Amateurs beat pros at predicting Apple's Q1 performance
When it comes to predicting Apple's financial performance, you may want to ask bloggers, day traders, and amateur analysts instead of listening to Wall Street analysts. As cited in a post by Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the real analysts blew it big time predicting Apple's financial numbers for the first quarter of 2012. As noted by Elmer-DeWitt, "although even the most bullish independents were surprised by the strength of Apple's Q1 2012 results, at least they were in the ball park." In a ranking of accuracy, the independent analysts took the top fifteen positions, while the Wall Street gurus brought up the bottom of the chart. That's not to say that Wall Street's finest aren't capable of making at least a few good estimates. Asymco's Horace Dediu and Sterne Agee's Shaw Wu were both accurate on predicting the Mac sales numbers. TUAW's favorite analyst, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, was right on target with his estimate of iPod sales. When it came to iPads and iPhones, though, the independents beat the street. Gabriel Dubois was close with his estimates of iPhone sales and gross margin, while Gregg Thurman "missed narrowly on iPads." Elmer-DeWitt notes that "The company that Steve Jobs built is still that rare beast in American business: A $400 billion giant that acts -- and grows -- like a start-up." That ability to be agile, design and sell innovative products, and make huge margins on sales of those products make it difficult for even the most highly-trained Wall Street analysts to make accurate predictions.
Google's Q4 2011 results: $2.71 billion profit, $8.13 billion in revenue, Wall Street disappointed
Google just released its fourth-quarter 2011 results, and man, Wall Street is not pleased. The company reported $2.71 billion in profit (up from $2.54 a year earlier), net revenue of $8.13 billion and earnings of $9.50 per share, excluding some one-time charges. That's less than the $10.49 per share and $8.40 billion financial analysts were expecting and, as Reuters notes, it's the first time in nine quarters that Google hasn't beaten revenue estimates. Of course, the company spun its results the best it could, emphasizing that its gross revenue jumped 25 percent to $10.58 billion, making this the first time the company's raw sales exceeded $10 billion in any given quarter. Of course, that figure doesn't reflect the myriad costs associated with boosting web traffic, and investors are more concerned with that $8.13 billion in net revenue. Needless to say, Wall Street is none too impressed -- as of this writing, the company's stock was down almost nine percent in after-hours trading.That's not to say Google is struggling. The outfit actually logged a sharp increase in clicks on its search ads, but said the fee it receives from those ads was down eight percent from both the previous quarter as well as the fourth quarter of 2010. Plus, by all metrics, Android is still on quite the tear. In a conference call with investors, the company said there are now 250 million Android devices, up 50 million from the last quarter. Some more tidbits: 7000,000 devices are being activated per day and more than 11 billion items have been downloaded from Android Market (it hit the 10-billion mark last month). Finally, Google+ now has 90 million worldwide users, more than double the figure from three months earlier. Need a deeper dive on the numbers? We've got the full financial results at the source link, with the summary earnings release below.
Former Apple supplier exec pleads guilty to leaking iPhone details
Former Flextronics employee Walter Shimoon pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and security fraud. Shimoon leaked information about upcoming Apple products to hedge fund traders in late 2009. He is one of 11 people who have admitted their guilt after the government's crackdown on insider trading. Mr Shimoon and the others were industry experts who worked with Wall Street analysts and managers. The government alleges this relationship got too cozy and the information shared between the two groups crossed the line from "permissible market research" to insider trading. Mr Shimoon was recorded talking about the unreleased iPad (K48 codename) and iPhone as well as confidential sales information. He told a government witness, "So, you can get, at Apple you can get fired for saying K48...outside of a, you know, outside of a meeting that doesn't have K48 people in it. That's how crazy they are about it." [Via AppleInsider]
Wall Street analysts think iCloud's future has a silver lining
Apple fans and developers apparently weren't the only people who liked the iCloud announcement on Monday at WWDC. As reported by Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Wall Street analysts are almost unanimous in their positive comments about iCloud's effect on the financial future of Apple. For example, Credit Suisse's Kulbinder Garcha is quoted as saying "Although Google and Amazon are already offering cloud based offering, we believe Apple has continued to lead innovation in the services space with the introduction of its iCloud, which we believe is superior to existing cloud services from competition." RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky was even more enthusiastic when discussing the PC-Free capabilities of iOS 5, noting that by "'cutting the cord' to the PC, Apple may expand its addressable device market by 4x, addressing the ~3B handset users who have a phone -- but not a PC." TUAW's favorite analyst, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, also chimed in on the ability of future iOS devices to work sans PC, and commented that "Bottom line is that Apple is increasing the likelihood that consumers buy multiple Apple devices ... Apple will be giving away iCloud for free (we had expected it to be priced between $25-$99 a year) ... sharing non iTunes music will cost $25 a year. (As a point of reference, Amazon's Cloud drive could cost up to $200 a year.)" The future for Apple looks as bright as the sunlight in those architectural renderings of the proposed Cupertino campus of our favorite company.
NPD: Mac sales up 47% in March
The numbers are out on NPD's March report for computer sales, and our favorite Apple analyst, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, said MacBook Pro sales continued to drive Mac sales overall, boosting them up to a 47 percent year-over-year-growth. Munster says that despite an overall drop in the amount of PC sales worldwide, Apple will likely announce Mac sales of 3.6 to 3.7 million units, which is slightly more than Wall Street expects. iPod sales, however, are reportedly down according to Munster and NPD's accounting. The analyst still expects sales to come in above expectations, but they're charting a 10 percent year-over-year drop for Apple's music players. Apple is set to announce earnings during a conference call this Wednesday -- we'll be listening in, of course, and we'll let you know what we hear.
'Can Apple maintain profitability?' Yes.
Seriously? This is the question of the day? When people are still voicing serious and legitimate concerns about the rest of the economy? We're talking about a company with enough money in the bank to make a Goldman Sachs-sized investment in Facebook if it wanted to, more than triple the amount Dell had in the bank at the end of the last quarter, plus more than five times the amount HP had too, while we're at it. Let's look at a number for a minute: Apple has 51 billion dollars in cash. That's 51,000,000,000 bucks. Or, approximately the amount of money it takes to fill a vault-slash-swimming-pool. Who has that kind of money these days and didn't get it via government bailout? Apple, that's who. What is its secret? It made that money the old-fashioned way, by selling new-fashioned things. In a time when few companies are profitable and everyone's excited about a flat line since it isn't a downward curve, Apple is making money iHand over iFist. One could presume from this that analysts and others who watch CNBC professionally would be excited about a company with growth and profitability in the current climate. However, that's not the case. Remember when Apple wasn't doing well? Those bygone days when people may have actually believed the name of the company was "Beleaguered Apple Computer?" Well, once Uncle Steve made his return in 1996, that started to turn around. Apple Computer started making things that start with "i," and in 2001 with the launch of the iPod, Apple was officially cool again. You know, unless you were an analyst on Wall Street, in which case Apple wasn't cool, it was just less lame than before. But seriously, have you seen what sort of stock prices Dell and HP have these days? Now those are tech companies. I call shenanigans! Now, instead of being impressed with profitability, the question is "Oh sure, you're all profitable, but can you stay that way?" Apple hasn't proven that yet? Explain to me how making ANY money in a time of unprecedented financial volatility is something that gets played down. What will it take before Apple gets a fair shake? A brand new device that sells a million units in three months? Try two and a half. A new version of the same thing released a year later, how long did that take to sell a million? Three days. Find and replace "Apple" with a non-tech company in some of these articles and see if it still makes as much sense. Just the iPhone product line by itself is bigger than Coca-Cola, but Apple still gets dismissed like this? Someone needs to have a little heart-to-heart talk with some of these guys. Apparently they've all had their heads down in their BlackBerrys for so long that they don't realize it's cool these days to carry around something Designed In Cupertino. Clearly a lot of other people have figured it out -- what's stopping Wall Street from seeing the light?
