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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (6019)	11/7/1997 10:25:00 PM
From: Joe E.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Re: "The only way that someone could hold the price at these artficial levels is to either sell shares they own or sell shares short (I hope I'm not displaying too much ignorance here )." Hate to throw cold water on a nice conspiracy theory, but today was a 7 million share day for AAPL. IMO the cost of an orchestrated effort to hold the price down or prop it up on a day like today would be enormous, and so nobody would do it. This is not like a government b'crat trying to prop up a currency with somebody else's money. Here everybody has a real bottom line so they don't throw money away. So let me suggest an alternative theory: Lot's of people have written Apple off and saw today as a good day to get out or to short the stock. These people sell. Lot's of OTHER people are excited about the possibility of a big announcement on Monday and are buying the stock for the expected bump or maybe for the long term. Others are afraid of the bump and are covering their short position to avoid it. These people buy. There are more buyers than sellers today, but not an overwhelming number more, so the price goes up, but not tooo much. No conspiracy needed, just a market. Monday the same thing will happen, but the balance between buyers and sellers will probably be different. Tuesday too. et cetera.

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (6019)	11/7/1997 10:40:00 PM
From: soup	Respond to of 213173

I have a simpler explanation for the AAPL selling. The most reasonable assumption is that the persons selling all those shares in the past few days are those that already owned it. As anyone on this thread can verify, buying AAPL stock in the face of massive analyst derision is not a casual purchase. For better or worse, AAPL buyers, more than most, know what they're getting themselves into. Why then would these knowing investors choose to sell at this most propitious juncture? My guess is that a portion of "smart money" AAPL owners are exchanging equity for short-term options. A rough count of Nov '97 call options shows a total open interest of about 30-35,000 contracts or 3-3.5 million shares with the majority of that volume coming in the last few days. 206.7.107.50 If so, they are creating another two days worth of trading volume that will have to be bought at some point -- in addition to the 11.7 days short interest volume. viwes.com soup