What’s wrong with Apple?

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Unhedged spent a good chunk of last week trying to make sense of two newly listed companies: Reddit and Trump Media & Technology Group. On Monday, both sold off hard. TMTG shares lost more than 20 per cent after reporting 2023 revenues of $4mn, less than half what the average Chick-fil-A franchise makes. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com

Apple the formerly magnificent

Only five of the Magnificent 7 tech stocks are performing magnificently in 2024. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia are all beating the market to a greater (Nvidia) or a lesser (Alphabet) degree. But Apple has performed very badly (down 8 per cent to the market’s 11 per cent gain) and Tesla horrendously (down 30 per cent):

Tesla’s performance may be worse, but it is not as worrying as Apple’s, from the point of view of the market. Tesla’s stock has always been highly speculative and volatile, and its valuation something of a mystery. Apple, on the other hand, was until recently the largest company by market cap (now it’s Microsoft), and it is still almost 6 per cent of the S&P 500. It is a symbol of what a tech company can be: hyper-profitable, highly stable and ever-expanding. That the stock is faltering makes one wonder whether something significant has changed in the market.

There are six plausible explanations we can think of for what is going on with Apple’s stock. Several are intertwined:

1. It became overvalued. Back in December, the shares hit 32 times trailing earnings, a peak only touched a few times in the past 10 years and only surpassed in the post-pandemic giddiness of 2021. The multiple is 26 times now. For a stock that is expected to increase earnings below the S&P 500’s average pace this year and next, that’s still a lot. And at such a high share price, Apple’s dividend and its share buyback programme provide less punch. 

2. Sales growth is set to stay soft because of both the smartphone replacement cycle and weak sales in China. A recent report from UBS estimated that iPhone sales fell 4 per cent in February from a year ago, driven by a 9 per cent decline in the US and a 16 per cent decline in China. While Wall Street revenue estimates have been stable recently, the tone has not been great. 

3. The market narrative changed. The big-tech-and-falling-rates story gave way in recent months to the big-tech-and-AI narrative, and AI is an area where Apple is considered to lag Google and Microsoft.

4. There has been a shift in investor preferences. For a while, many pundits — including Unhedged — talked about Apple as a “defensive growth” stock, with high barriers to entry and a big services business to carry it through the economic cycle. But with the US economy continuing to outperform expectations and fear subsiding, defensiveness may be getting less of a premium. 

5. As the US election approaches, China risks become more acute. Economic nationalism is on the rise in both countries. This has already hurt Apple’s sales in China, and tariffs may hit margins in the US before long. 

6. Legal trouble. The list is long here, but the most recent and relevant challenge comes from the Department of Justice, which thinks Apple is a monopolist and will try to force the company to tear down some of its barriers to entry.    

The last threat strikes us as the least important, based on the history of legal challenges against US tech giants. We’re willing to bet that once the case has been resolved, the industry will have changed enough that the points of dispute will be less relevant to Apple’s future. Nor are we too impressed with the sales growth explanation. Revenues have been flattish at Apple for a while, but the sell-off is recent. Similarly China risk — it’s just not a new story. Valuation is never much of an explanation on its own. That leaves the rise of the AI narrative and the decline in the appeal of “defensive tech”. If those two explain the bulk of the Apple drawdown, then the stock’s relative performance may only improve when the AI hype fades a bit and the economic backdrop degrades. We are keen to hear readers’ views on this. 

Momentum vs sentiment

Market rule number one: be fearful when others are greedy. Market rule number two: don’t bet against momentum. Good rules to follow, but right now they conflict.

We’ve discussed sunny sentiment several times lately. Our go-to measure, the net bullishness among investors surveyed weekly by the American Association of Individual Investors, has been consistently positive all year:

In the past week, moreover, Citi’s Levkovich index has moved into “euphoria” territory, which has historically preceded periods of subpar returns. This is a broad measure of sentiment, pulling together indicators from across several markets. What tipped the index euphoric, notes Scott Chronert at Citi, was limited options hedging and rising margin debt:

Next, momentum. There are many sophisticated indicators of momentum, but delving too far into technical analysis is treacherous (for us, anyway). We prefer keeping it simple, by comparing an index’s recent performance to its 200-day moving average, which is supposed to capture how concentrated buying or selling has been. As of Monday, the S&P 500 was 14 per cent above its 200-day average:

This is high. The chart below visualises the strength of recent momentum against 80 years of S&P 500 performance, though using weekly rather than daily data. For the past two months, the S&P 500 has traded about 15 per cent above its 52-week moving average. That is in the top decile of historical momentum, as you can see in the chart:

Euphoric sentiment urges caution, but strong momentum suggests investors should let it ride. Which to believe?

The equity strategists we follow have seemed mostly unworried about sentiment. As Chris Verrone of Strategas noted yesterday, rising breadth helps make market euphoria look a bit less scary:

The immediate risk we see is sentiment (i.e., the bar of expectations is high), but so far fatigue in the market’s most pronounced momentum corners has been met with strength elsewhere. Last week was a good example of this . . . the Momentum Factor ETF (MTUM) has stalled, reflecting some modest relative weakening from Tech, but the % of stocks above the 200-day moving average closed at its highest level in about 3 years (85%). In equally-weighted terms, Energy, Industrials, Financials, and Materials actually all outperformed Tech in 1Q — you could probably win a bar bet with that fact.

Remember the backdrop: consistently surprising economic strength. The Citi US Economic Surprise index, which measures how much data beats analyst expectations, has been well into positive territory all year. We got a fresh reminder of this yesterday, with an above-expectations ISM survey showing US manufacturing expanding for the first time in a year and a half. And as Chronert points out, S&P 500 performance this year has been notably correlated with economic surprises (his chart):

The simultaneously strong market momentum and delirious sentiment doesn’t worry us so much — so long as underlying economic growth keeps surprising to the upside. When growth slows, we’ll pick one to follow. (Ethan Wu)

One good read

The post-Dalio Bridgewater turnaround isn’t going great.

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