John Zechner Apple Inc AAPL-Q PARTIAL SELL Dec 02, 2024

Global tech behemoth. His son always tells him that it's all about the ecosystem. That's what drives customer loyalty and recurring revenue. Innovation continues to drive earnings and customer loyalty. Services are where it's at on a go-forward basis. Apple Music is very high margin and recurring revenue, offsets sporadic cyclicality in hardware sales. 

AI initiatives offer good growth potential. Balance sheet is bigger than many countries combined. FCF generation very strong. Shareholder friendly initiatives. Sees 15% earnings growth going forward. High, high quality for long-term investors. Yield is 0.4%.

They generate $110 billion in free cash from services to buy back shares. Eventually they will get AI right. He trades this like crazy. Very positive.

Will be fine, if they could work with other companies to build AI into their products. Does it matter to earnings if they aren't the first out of the gate with applying AI? Not really. What matters is they make the best version of whatever anyone has made in the past three years. 

It leads the Mag 7 this week. The quarter was fine. In response to tariffs, they are moving some supply chains to Indonesia and Indian, away from China. Chinese phones are taking market share, but we've gotten past this news. Apple services were +14% this quarter and beat the top and bottom with an 8% growth rate. He will ride it up.

30% is too high, even the greatest stock of all time. Don't sell all of it, but gradually sell it down to 5% weight.

They will spend over $500 billion in the US in the next 4 years to manufacture in the US. Have faith in CEO Tim Cook, given his track record.

The ones that are nice to King Trump. He'd hope that TSLA and AAPL would escape additional tariffs on China. 

Except for TSLA, the other Mag 6 have come down to very reasonable valuations. For example, AMZN's trading at a discount to WMT, which makes no sense. GOOG is trading at 19x earnings. Thinks AAPL growth will be double digit. This is your chance to buy quality companies at reasonable valuations. See his Top Picks.

Down 19% from recent highs. PEG ratio is 2x. Discounted due to concerns over momentum in China, but he thinks that's overplayed. If he had to choose today, he'd choose AMZN because it's a bit cheaper.

Bears don't like Apple here. Now trades at 30x PE. But Apple has 1.3 billion users. They will have a foldable phone next year.