Early reviews of the iPhone 5 are in, and the verdict is mostly positive. Investors see that as a precursor to a massive upgrade cycle, resulting in another huge rally in Apple’s
Salesforce.com
CEO Marc Benioff teased what’s to come at TechCrunch’s Disrupt confab in San Francisco, announcing plans for a file-sharing service similar to Dropbox, and a single sign-on app for cloud applications. It's called Salesforce.com Identity, and users may find it reminiscent of Facebook’s
What’s the Big Idea?
For those unfamiliar with this weekly series, I’m going head-to-head with Mr. Market in a three-year showdown to see who’s better at producing returns for investors. Here’s where I stand as of this writing:
|
Company |
Starting Price* |
Recent Price |
Total Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | $420.59** | $691.28 | 64.4% |
| $650.09 | $709.68 | 9.2% | |
| Rackspace Hosting | $41.65 | $65.83 | 58.1% |
| Riverbed Technology | $25.95 | $22.82 | (12.1%) |
| Salesforce.com | $100.93 | $159.43 | 57.9% |
| AVERAGE RETURN | -- | -- | 35.50% |
| S&P 500 SPDR | $126.50** | $147.24 | 16.39% |
| DIFFERENCE | -- | -- | 19.11 |
Source: Yahoo! Finance.
* Tracking began at market close on Jan. 6, 2012.
** Adjusted for dividends and other returns of capital.
My portfolio’s lead widened by another two percentage points, outperforming the broader market, despite strong gains from every index. Once more, the Russell 2000 led the pack, this time rising 2.66%, as the Dow added 2.15% and the S&P 500 gained 1.94%. Only the tech-heavy Nasdaq failed to get within spitting distance of a 2% gain, ending the week up a still-impressive 1.52%, CNBC reports.
Notable newsmakers
Partial credit for the rally has to go to the Fed. The central bank announced plans for "QE3," a quantitative easing program that involves purchasing $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities per month until there are noticeable improvements in the labor market and overall economy.
Ratings agency Egan-Jones lowered its rating of U.S. sovereign debt in the wake of the news -- from AA to AA-minus -- but it didn’t matter. Investors dove back into equities on higher volume Friday, bidding up industrial stocks such as United Technologies and Caterpillar, both of which ended the week up more than 3% each.
Is this much bullishness warranted? Perhaps. At the very least, it’s instructive to consider the math. My Foolish colleague Morgan Housel went back and looked at three models for investing. The one built around buying stocks only during recessionary periods did best.
While the data didn’t specify which types of equities did best, today’s investors appear to be hungry for social media names. Shares of Facebook and Zynga
How to profit from the iPhone 5
Social stocks may be on the rise now, but it’s Apple and the iPhone 5 that will occupy the spotlight for the foreseeable future. Will the new device be a winner? As a shareholder, I’m hoping so.
And, yet, you needn’t own Apple to profit from the iPhone 5. Foolish colleague Evan Niu is out with new research on the device’s most likely component suppliers; it’s included as a free bonus to subscribers to the Fool’s new Apple research report. Sign up today, and you’ll get the initial report plus the iPhone 5 bonus, and a year’s worth of free updates. Click here to get started now.
See you back here next weekend for more tech stock talk. In the meantime, if you’d like to tell us more about a Breaker in the making that you believe is being unfairly maligned or ignored, please do so using the comments just below.
