Apple Shares Shift In Wake Of New Product Announcements

Stocks go up, stocks go down, and apart from earnings, rumors, and analyst notes, things tend to rub along mostly in sync across public equities. But then there are days when a company announces a raft of new products and their pricing data. It signals to buyers, investors and the public how it intends to shape at least part of its next year.

Often, investors’ reaction to such news is blasé. I have mostly found that they don’t vet a new piece of product news by shoving around the shares of a public company, though there are counter-examples. I would posit that the larger and more diversified the company, the lesser the impact.

And then there is Apple, which combines the chimera properties of both diverse hardware revenues, along with software and cloud incomes. The company’s product-release days tend to have a larger media spotlight attached to them than what other firms’ can engender. As such, we should perhaps not be overly surprised that when Apple talks, the markets listen.

I present to you an adapted chart, derived from Google Finance, with some notes verified byZeroHedge and Business Insider:

The event started with Apple’s stock rising during its new MacBook portion. The company’s share price peaked at the start of its Watch segment. Following, as the company announced the pricing of the Watch among other things, it saw its shares slip. Apple then recovered, pushing back into positive territory by the end of regular trading.

Each percent change in Apple stock is worth around $7.5 billion, making movements of 2 or 3 percent more interesting than watching a midcap, buffeted by larger market forces, move in the same way.

Today, Apple at least met market expectations, but investors awarded muted praise. Are investors too negative, or were the gains predicated in Apple having a good product day priced into its shares already? Perhaps both.