Tuesday, June 11, 2024

"Apple stock surges to record high after AI announcements" (AAPL)

Two things upfront.

1) I, and the market, may have misread things yesterday:
"Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote, including Apple Intelligence, Siri makeover" (AAPL)
The market appears to be a bit underwhelmed, AAPL down $3.74 (1.90%) at $193.15....

2) We didn't misread nuthin'. What Apple announced is pretty damn feeble. 

From Yahoo Finance who may be ascribing today's $11.79 (+6.11%) uptick to the wrong motive force.

Apple (AAPL) stock surged more than 5% on Tuesday to reach an intraday record as investors digested the announcement of its AI platform, Apple Intelligence.

After the stock fell on Monday during and after the company's WWDC conference, the stock moved higher as some Wall Street analysts cheered the company's announcements.

"If you look at the signal away from the noise, you realize that this is unprecedented capability that Apple is going to introduce and it's going to integrate AI into everyday life," D.A. Davidson managing director Gil Luria told Yahoo Finance (video above).

Following Monday's event, Luria upgraded Apple to buy from Neutral and raised his price target to $230 from $200.

On Monday, Apple announced "Apple Intelligence," its long-awaited foray into the generative AI space. The company said the platform would be integrated across the company's hardware and software products ranging from the iPhone and Mac to mail, messages, and photos. Apple Intelligence will be available for the iPhone 15 Pro and iPads and Macs running Apple's M1 series chips and newer later this fall.

Key features of the launch include updates to Siri, which will now be able to, for instance, parse phones for addresses sent in messages or find photos in a phone's photo library based on voice prompts. Apple also launched new software updates for its iPhone, watches, and computer products.

"Our experience with consumer surveys with prior generations of iPhone launches tell us that the hardware upgrade cycle is more driven by a collection of feature upgrades across diverse applications, which in aggregate will provide...reasons to upgrade over the next few years," JPMorgan senior analyst Samik Chatterjee wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

He added: "The release of the AI features across Mac, iPads and iPhones will support an upgrade cycle across all the devices."

The announcements capped off a month of excitement around the stock as rumors around some of the news, including a partnership with ChatGPT operator OpenAI, had already been percolating....

....MUCH MORE

Today's action in the stock almost looks like a relief rally. Possibly relief that the announcements weren't even more feeble than they were.