share tips for 2019

Jan 5, 2019 -- 12:56PM, roadrunner46 wrote:

apple another company that have performed badly in 2018, they will be selling their new iphones for around£5.000 in the future just need the chinese to start buying the phones again52 week high 233.4752 week low 142.00current price 148.26this one could go to around 180/200 price range, once again looking at 6 month time frame.

i thought i covered all this with this post, apparently apple are worth 999 billion, makes some good points,
make my own mind up, these high volume gamblers who work in that industry, they get it wrong all the time

Jan 7, 2019 -- 9:41PM, mrcombustible wrote:

The Sunday Times, January 6 2019, 12:01amWhen Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007, Mike Lazaridis was at home, working up a sweat on his treadmill. On the television, the co-founder and showman of Apple was waxing poetic about the elegant little rectangle with a touchscreen and full web browser. The founder of Research in Motion, whose flagship product, Blackberry, had half the nascent smartphone market, wondered: “How did they do that?” He spoke to Jim Balsillie, his co-chief executive, and he was not alarmed. “We’ll be fine,” he opined.BlackBerry, of course, was not fine. It quickly faded into irrelevance, its market share withering from 50% to less than 1%. The Canadian company’s bosses had not realised the gravity of the moment, for it was Jobs who really rang in the smartphone era. Over the next 12 years, more than 3.7bn people would buy an iPhone, or a cheaper copycat, connecting the world like never before. It also set Apple on an unprecedented run of profits that last year led to it becoming the first public company worth more than $1 trillion. Profits grew 11-fold over the period.Every streak, though, comes to an end — even for Apple. Chief executive Tim Cook shocked investors on Wednesday with a huge profit warning. Sales of iPhones, profits and turnover had all fallen dramatically short of 2018 projections, he said, while providing little assurance that the road ahead would be easier. Apple stock plunged 9% on the news, falling from $157.92 to $144.04 and capping a torrid three months during which it has lost 39% of its value since October’s high of $232. It closed on Friday at $148.26. Investors fret that Apple’s sudden slowdown marks the crossing of the Rubicon into a new era of corporate lethargy, with Apple living off retreads of past inventions rather than coming up with new ones. Goldman Sachs went so far as to compare Apple with Nokia, another once-innovative brand that the Cupertino juggernaut swept aside.Beyond Apple itself, the shock announcement fanned concerns about a wider economic slowdown. Indeed, the following day, America’s ISM manufacturing index revealed the biggest monthly slowdown in factory activity since the 2008 recession. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 2.8% before recovering on positive job news at the end of the week. The FTSE also yo-yoed, shedding 41 points before ending Friday in positive territory at 6,837.Apple’s fall cannot be explained away simply by a weakening economy in China — though Cook tried. “Over 100%” of worldwide sales declines, he said, were due to disappointing China sales. The problems run deeper. Nearly three in four adults on the planet have smartphones. Most of the rest will buy one, too — but they are in the developing world and unlikely to be able to afford an iPhone.The upshot is that we have reached what Benedict Evans, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has called “the end of the beginning”. The era of an always-on, wired-in planet of consumers has arrived. By extension, the era of smartphone mega-growth appears to be over.Indeed, sales of high-end smartphones peaked in 2015 and have gone down every year since. Last year was the first that smartphone sales, at all price points, fell, according to Bernstein Research.Which harks back to BlackBerry’s flat-footed founders. Their company was obliterated by a new product that redefined what a phone could be. Today, despite design supremo Sir Jony Ive’s best efforts, the iPhone is not appreciably different from any number of rivals with huge touchscreens, professional-quality cameras and superfast connections.Yet Cook still sells his smartphones as if they are. The average retail price for an iPhone is about $800 (£630)— almost five times the average for a non- Apple handset. Not surprisingly, people are holding on to them longer. The average upgrade cycle — when people trade in old phones for new models — has extended from two years to three, robbing Apple of a key profit driver. Cook did not countenance the possibility last week that he may have gone too far with the £1,000 iPhone X, or other models that sell at a premium to rival models with similar capabilities. Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi understood his dilemma, writing: “Drop prices and margins will be pressured and could cannibalise higher-end offerings. Maintain prices, and customers could increasingly look to less expensive alternatives.”Perhaps the most salient point revealed by last week’s announcement was that Apple has lost China, the world’s second-biggest economy and source of a fifth of the company’s sales. There are several reasons, but the biggest is WeChat. The app, created by Chinese giant Tencent, is central to life in the People’s Republic in a way that most westerners simply can’t comprehend. It is a social network that allows people to book travel, hail a cab, pay for lunch, make phone calls, transfer funds . . . the list goes on. And it works on the cheapest Android handsets just as well as it does on an iPhone X.The key to the appeal of the iPhone as a luxury product is its iOS operating system, which houses messages, photos and contacts — and manages apps — that are shared across other Apple devices. This makes it painful for anyone to give up their iPhone for a rival. If you leave, you lose it all. That has created an incredibly powerful moat around the Apple fortress. WeChat, however, obviates the need for iOS, which makes it that much harder to justify paying for an iPhone.A China-based businessman said: “Why would I pay $800 more for a piece of hardware where all I need it for is WeChat? It makes no sense. The iPhone is just one phone of many — and it’s by far the most expensive.” Indeed, while the iPhone has more than a third of the British market, in China its share has halved from 14% to 7% in the past three years.Apple’s stumble also appears to have confirmed the worst fears of investors who have grown increasingly concerned that China, the engine of the global economy’s post-recession resurgence, is slowing down. Chinese car sales in November plunged 14% from the same month the year before — a fall that was “quite unprecedented”, said George Magnus, associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and author of the book Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy.He said that the fall, along with meagre income growth, contracting factory activity and a jump in the household debt-to-income ratio to 107% — near the level America hit before the recession — were all signs that “the slowdown in China is becoming ubiquitous”.Donald Trump’s trade war has added to the problems. Cook admitted last week that the tension between Washington and Beijing “appeared to reach consumers as well, with traffic to our retail stores and our channel partners in China declining”.The Chinese have a history of selectively shunning foreign products, either through state-sponsored campaigns or spontaneous boycotts. Beijing boycotted Norwegian salmon after dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel peace prize in Oslo in 2010. Japanese products were hit in 2013 in the wake of a territorial row over the Senkaku Islands. Magnus said: “The Chinese have form here.”Referring to the recent arrest in Canada of the finance chief of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, at America’s behest, a China insider said: “If you arrest a Chinese chief financial officer, people view it here as all-out war. Apple has become a lightning rod for everything American at the moment.”The good news is that Apple is neither BlackBerry nor Nokia. It has $130bn in cash, which is enough to buy, say, Netflix. It sells more Apple Watch models than all the timepieces turned out by Switzerland. Its services business, which encompasses everything from iCloud to the App Store and Apple Music, is on pace to bring in more than $40bn this year and is wildly profitable. Apple Music is an empire within the empire that, if it stood alone, would easily slot into the Fortune 100 rankings of the top US companies.It is a key area for Cook. Short of a “next big thing” such as a big plunge into healthcare or a self-driving car (Apple is developing an electric car, but it is thought to be years away), the company must pull the levers it can to extract more cash from its iPhones and iPads. Apple has an installed base of 1.3bn devices around the world.This is why Cook has signed the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Oprah Winfrey to huge contracts for shows that it plans to offer in a beefed-up Apple Music subscription that will include streaming films. Cook’s next trick: turning every Apple device into a cash machine that, every month, sends cash — be it through subscriptions or a cut of in-app purchases — back to the “spaceship” campus in Silicon Valley.It is not as sexy as a category-defining gadget but, for Apple, which is approaching 43 years old, figuring out creative new ways to make money off its past glories is vital. In his investor letter, Cook wrote: “Apple innovates like no other company on Earth, and we are not taking our foot off the gas.”The problem is that since Cook took over in 2011, Apple’s innovation record has been lacking — and the era of mega-growth, which was unleashed by the smartphone revolution and has defined Cook’s reign, is over.Apple iPhone XS Max, from £1,099The handset has a huge, 6.5in display and takes great photos with a minimum of fuss. It also has a hard-to-swallow price tag, no headphone jack and no fingerprint sensor (use face recognition to unlock). Wireless charging is useful, but slower than relying on an old-fashioned cable.Huawei Mate 20 Pro, £900Not an Apple fan? Android is the only other smartphone system in town, and the Mate20 Pro shows it off in state-of-the-art hardware. That means a triple-lens camera, massive battery, fingerprint sensor built into the screen, and a “wraparound” display to make the iPhone look stale.Motorola One, £280Motorola has found the sweet spot between hi-tech and low price. Its new One largely lacks the extra, probably unwanted, apps that many makers load onto Android, and concentrates on what most users want: long battery life, big screen, turbo recharging and, at 64GB, generous storage.

ive been proven right time and time again, currently trading $27 dollars more than when you posted this story, i do hope you didnt put anyone off investing