One of the catalysts or news flow items over the weekend was Berkshire Hathaway slashing its stake in Apple, largely to generate cash. But there's this story on the Bloomberg about how Apple investors have been urged to keep calm in spite of what happened elsewhere. We're just concerned about growth. The Apple side of this story plays. When you have declines of this magnitude, you mentioned the 10% decline in the early hours of trading. Now it's down to about a 3% decline. These are more macro-related issues when you have those big swings in that volatility, right. There's nothing that Apple necessarily did. There's no news item related to Apple's actions or product, its earnings from last week. A lot of this has to do with macro concerns, the situation currently going on in the Middle East, the uncertainty surrounding the election, people wanting to hold on to their cash. But of course, as you mentioned, the Warren Buffett.

Berkshire Hathaway news from over the
weekend compared to the beginning of 2024.
Buffett stake in Apple is now half of what it was.
He still has an about an $84.2 billion stake.
So a huge stake remaining in Apple. But when you get those headlines about
Warren Buffett, right. Selling that much apple over the course
of the last 6 to 8 months, that could be concerning, combined with some of the
other concerns, Greater China, artificial intelligence growth, the
performance of the iPhone moving forward, their guidance, certainly all
of that combined in addition to the macro factors.
Bloomberg News reflected going into Apple's earnings that some of the run up
in the stock over recent weeks and months had been really about faith that
Apple intelligence would deliver. You've written over the weekend after
earnings that actually with Apple intelligence, there's a long way to go.
What were your arguments?

Yeah.
Apple intelligence obviously is going to be a big initiative for Apple moving
forward. They're marketing this heavily on the
earnings call. I didn't get an official count, but I'm
sure Tim Cook mentioned it at least 15, 20 times.
Nearly every analyst asked about it. That has been a big catalyst to the
stock growth. But I don't think the initial feature
set or even the feature set in totality is something that's going to drive
iPhone upgrades for this cycle. I think it's something that's probably
going to drive upgrades in future cycles.
Now I want to be clear. I don't think there is a connection
between realizations about the performance of artificial intelligence
and this Apple stock decline. If you look at the rest of the market,
they're in decline as well. So I think it's largely about more macro
factors than anything very specific in particular.

Apple Shares Plunge as Berkshire Slashes Stake

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