Rephrase and rearrange the whole content into a news article. I want you to respond only in language English. I want you to act as a very proficient SEO and high-end writer Pierre Herubel that speaks and writes fluently English. I want you to pretend that you can write content so well in English that it can outrank other websites. Make sure there is zero plagiarism.: Got stopped by a faithful viewer while making a hard left turn with a full cart at Costco Sunday. Reasonable guy. Asked a double-edged question: “What can you do to make my Apple stock go up.” Double-edged because the stock has done nothing since June 2023, but it’s up 30 points from a year ago. (And, of course, I can’t do anything personally to make any stock go up or down.) Then again, Meta Platforms put on 80 points in one day, one of the single greatest gains I’ve ever seen. So, why not shoot for the moon? Now, my first answer to the gentleman should have been a simple riposte: “Well, how about Costco ?” The retailer has picked up almost 200 points in a year, plus it finally declared the special dividend shareholders like the Club had been waiting for. (We’re still waiting for a membership fee hike, which is historically overdue.) I was thinking fast, but not that fast having just been deciding whether or not to get the huge plastic bottle of M & M’s. The answer was, of course, yes. So, I settled into a simple, “It’s not been all that bad.” He pressed. I didn’t demure. I said how about the $3,500-plus Vision Pro mixed reality headset that went on sale Friday – Apple’s first new product category since the Watch in 2015. He asked me if I thought it was going to be big. I gave him the answer I have heard from everyone who has worn one, and no one who hasn’t: Yes, it sure will be. It will be meaningful. On Friday, we had so many storylines going it is hard to get your head around Apple’s Vision Pro launch and its import. Consider that the night before we had a spectacular set of numbers from Amazon , including a staggering figure of a decline of 45 cents per the equivalent of a package sent to your door. Given that, all in it can cost more than $2 per package to get it to your door. This savings is monumental, and Amazon is not done. There will be more savings. There will be many more packages. So, the strength of the stock has more to do with a cost trajectory then a revenue trajectory, at least on Prime. The return to growth on Amazon Web Services (AWS) versus a year ago stunned people as did the advertising growth. Meta? What can I say ? No one really knew what to do here because we have never seen or heard anything like it. You had something I can’t recall ever hearing from not just a tech executive but any executive, period. It was a realization that you simply didn’t need as many people as you thought to make a ton of money when you have Nvidia chips that will do it for you by making your ads better and better while enticing you to put up your own content in a more stunning way. CEO Mark Zuckerberg never forgot that Meta is an advertising company with free content – made by you (us), the user. But it also has Reels. This most competitive man will get Reels to be better than TikTok. I have no idea how that will happen. However, you can be sure that TikTok won’t see it coming. During the call Zuckerberg dropped that Meta sold a billion dollars’ worth of other products from the black hole that was the metaverse (officially known as Reality Labs), mainly from good sales of the Quest 3 headset and unbelievable sales from the new connected Ray-Bans that actually look like Ray-Bans, so you don’t feel like a geek wearing them. And, they take great pictures while you can also answer calls and texts. For a really “uncool” guy like Zuckerberg, these are really cool, although I think he’s become a lot cooler lately than we might have thought. Then we got an employment number Friday that was incredibly strong with a little bit of wage growth, something that sent the bonds tumbling (and inversely, bond yields higher) but not the stocks. While the positive distortion from tech is once again, duly noted, I think that we’re getting our arms around the idea that this whole soft landing versus hard landing for the economy thesis is a tiresome dichotomy. We must move on to something I used to talk about but gave up on when the intelligentsia drowned me out: no landing at all. That’s right, why do we have to talk about a landing. That’s the vernacular of those who think crash versus no crash but not of those of us who think there is enough stimulus in the air. There’s enough corporate formation and construction and travel and leisure and shopping – as long as you know where it’s done – and transporting (watch that Dow Jones Transportation Average , as my writing partner Matt Horween points out, it’s looking important to the positive side) that we can argue that the Federal Reserve should leave interest rates as is may be an awfully good to generate some deflation where it can be found. (Deflation is when prices go down. Disinflation is when price are still going up but at a slower rate.) So, you had (1) Meta on fire, (2) Amazon just spectacular, and (3) the bond market not behaving and the stock market not caring. Talk about a three-for-three situation. Then there’s Apple. To journey back to Costco, I told that gentlemen in the candy aisle one more thing: Apple’s stock dropped like a stone at Friday’s opening after the previous evening’s guide down, hitting $179 per share almost immediately and then proceeded to claw its way back in a remarkable move to unchanged at $186. It hung around there all day and finished only 1 point lower. Now these kinds of moves usually require some sort of retest, and I expect that sellers will be grateful to be given a second chance to roll out of the stock. I look at it somewhat differently, though. I am a firm believer that stocks that can withstand guidance cuts and finish only down a dollar may have something going for them that we don’t know. AAPL 5Y mountain Apple 5 years Let’s start with what we do know. Apple had a strong quarter last despite some real weakness in China. Despite the bears’ best efforts to portray this as an Apple problem with a Huawei share-take, encouraged by the Chinese government no less, I don’t find Apple’s travails any different in China than anyone else’s because China, for all intents and purposes, is in some sort of massive slowdown that is hidden by all but its stock benchmarks, which, by the way, I think are about to get a real People’s Republic of China (PRC) makeover. I would not put it past them to start arresting large sellers if that’s what it takes. What don’t we know about Apple? Let me give Club members some of my insight from talking to CEO Tim Cook before the conference call. I think that Cook isn’t as focused on China as so many others are. I don’t think he’s as focused on iPhone sales as many think. He is focused on everything, every line item, and how to improve them all – from the iPhone to the Mac to AirPods to the Watch and to Services revenue. And, most importantly, something he has been working on for almost a decade: The Vision Pro. All of these initiatives are the product of one mindset: keeping the customer loyal to Apple, which is measured by customer satisfaction, and it probably has the highest satisfaction of any company in history. What does that customer satisfaction allow Cook to do? Plenty. It allows him, for example, to ponder whether to have an ad tier on Apple TV+ now that there is so much content. It allows him to consider being the world’s…
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