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…
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