At the beginning of this year, Apple (NASDAQ 🙂 frightened the markets by reducing its sales forecasts for the first time since 2002. The company blamed a significant decline in iPhone sales in China, as well as weaker sales in the more mature markets. markets.
The fall in revenues from $ 91 billion to $ 84 billion, although modest, prompted Apple to fall 10% of the day to the lowest level since mid-2017, which turned out to be the low point for this year, with a price recovery of the 200-week average, and has recovered all those losses over the past three months and then some, although it still lags far behind the October peaks of $ 233.40.
The stock price recovery in recent months has re-tested an important level of $ 198.50 in the past week, which is the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement from the entire downward movement from record highs last year to the low point in January, making the Apple media event today a major marker in terms of where the stock price goes to the next.
A move of more than $ 200 could be a good signal for further gains towards the summits, and Nasdaq also recorded strong gains this quarter, after some very sharp declines at the end of last year
Much of the profits in the American markets in recent years have been driven by the American technological revolution, and nowhere is it better illustrated than in the American Fang + index, which was created in November 2017, and is a index that follows the movements of the following US tech stocks: Facebook (NASDAQ :), Apple, Amazon (NASDAQ :), Netflix (NASDAQ 🙂 and Google, now known as Alphabet (NASDAQ :), plus Twitter (NYSE 🙂 , Baidu (NASDAQ :), NVIDIA (NASDAQ :), Tesla (NASDAQ 🙂 and Alibaba (NYSE :). The index has consistently acted as a leading indicator for other US indices in recent years and as such has become an important barometer for investors to identify potential turning points in investor sentiment in the US
Since Apple is such an important part of the US Fang + index, today's media event is probably a major referee on how not only Apple is performing in the coming weeks, but also the Fang + index, considering that both Amazon was until recently trillion-dollar companies, and could well be again.
Apple has & # 39; It & # 39; s Showtime & # 39; titled and launches its star-studded event at 1 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) or 5 p.m. (British Time), but there will be a pre-show sooner. The reason that this is a major problem for Apple is that we have reached the maximum iPhone in terms of sales, mainly because the average price level is now so much higher and companies such as Huawei and Samsung (KS 🙂 have eaten their market share.
This means that the services will now have to try to pick up the slack and to some extent we have seen that happen. The revenue from services has risen sharply in recent years, but it will not be able to get close to the margins we have seen in terms of hardware revenue.
Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes, the App Store and Apple Care are all major growth areas for Apple, and today's event is expected to mark the launch of a news subscription service, as well as video streaming of movies and TV shows. This is an area where Apple has lagged behind, with Apple TV a largely neglected piece of hardware in the last few years. As such, Apple and Amazon have been launching Netflix for the last couple of years when it comes to content streaming, and if Apple wants to reach its $ 14 billion per quarter revenue target by 2020, monetizing its subscriber base will be much more effective .
Currently, Amazon and Netflix already have apps that are fully integrated into most new Smart TVs, while Sky Q users can access their own subscription from their own Sky Q menu. Amazon already has its own TV Firestick, which also has the Netflix app and offers full access to both movie databases via Alexa.
Although Apple seems to want to leave the content route and already want to fund some of its own shows, the amount of money it spends does not seem to match that of its peers. This is strange considering that it has a huge head start when it comes to available money, in the sense that it generates much more money from its other companies compared to Netflix (NASDAQ :), which spend billions of dollars every year on new content , and do not add subscribers to the required rate to match those expenses.
In short, while today's event could be the start of Apple taking on the ante in the online streaming sector, it will find itself catching up to its peers unless it can collaborate with some of the competition, a foothold in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive with every passing month.
How investors react to today's star-studded event could determine whether Apple's stock fell back more than $ 200 and whether the US Fang + index remained higher from the January low. It could be an ideal opportunity for investors to get their FANGs in a piece of Apple; or it could be a case of it, that is all people!
