Zaky
FORTUNE — With Apple (AAPL) trading just over $530 a share — under 13 times last year’s earnings and 10.56 times his estimated October earnings — Bullish Cross‘ Andy Zaky on Thursday told his readers to buy:
“Those who have been waiting for a correction in Apple to buy the stock now have that opportunity to do so. On a technical basis, Apple is the second most oversold it has been since the lows of the financial crisis. Only on June 20, 2011 — when Apple bottomed at $310.50 a share ahead of a 30% July rally — did we see more oversold conditions on Apple. Even the flash crash didn’t result in more oversold conditions.” (link)
For those of you who’ve never heard of Zaky, he was one of the first independent Apple analysts to challenge Wall Street, issuing estimates quarter after quarter that were considerably more accurate than the professionals’. (See, for example, here.)
Through his articles on Fortune.com, Apple Insider and Seeking Alpha, Zaky became something of a cult figure among Internet-oriented day traders. In 2011 he started a hedge fund — Bullish Cross Asset Management — that was quickly oversubscribed. At the 2012 Apple Investors Summit in Los Angeles, he was mobbed by his young admirers.
Between July 2006 and and July 2011 Zaky issued four “buy” recommendations on Apple, and his timing has been — as he would be the first to tell you — “impeccable.” Each was made at or near a bottom, and the stock not yet failed to reach his price targets. See here.
He was warning subscribers to expect a correction long before April 9’s all-time intraday high of $644, which he felt was unsupported.
Thursday’s call to buy Apple was Zaky’s fifth:
“Today we feel that Apple is a strong buy anywhere between $500 and $530 a share and a buy between $530 and $550 a share. We expect Apple to test $750 a share sometime before the end of this coming January. That is roughly 50% higher than where the stock is trading today.”
You can read his full post here.
Apple closed Thursday at $530.12, down nearly $114 (17.7%) from its peak in April. It was up more than $12 in early morning trading Friday.
UPDATE: Asymco’s Horace Dediu tweets: “Apple’s P/E ex cash is about 10. On a forward basis ex cash $AAPL P/E is 7.”
