The stock market....

The stock market is a weird world, isn't it?
The reason for the rhetorical question is due to reading a bbc article on the bbc, "Technology - the party really is over".

What I don't get is the volatility of it all. There are articles out there that say that any comment or "random" event can cause major fluctuations in a companies stick. For instance take this article about a citizen journalist who claimed on iReport.com that Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. As a result apple stock dropped more than 2%. Give me a break! That's like me changing Steve Jobs wikipedia profile to add "Steve has confided to friends that by the end of 2008 he will be in a comfortable position to retire." A quote that is completely untrue and probably would be edited out very quickly, but nonetheless, if it is then quoted a few times with some bold headline "STEVE JOBS SET TO RETIRE" the impact could be substantial but completely unnecessary.
Another example of this can be seen with the United Stock when it was announced that they were going bankrupt in September 2008, unfortunetly the article was from 2002... The result:
"After trading around $12 a share Monday morning, the stock of United parent company, UAL Corp., dropped at least as low as $4.62 about five minutes after the ISA article was posted on the Bloomberg terminal. The shares fell as low as $3 before Nasdaq halted trading less around 11 a.m. EDT" Herald Tribute

Back to the original point. Looking at the current apple chart at the moment:

$200 - $90 in a few months...

Even with the credit crunch this is astonishing. Fair enough, with the banks failing, loans defaulting and large credit card bills many cannot afford to go on spending sprees. Honestly though, who is not going to buy an apple product in the next year?!? I'ld go a step further, which parents at christmas are going to get requests from their kids, for ipods, iphones, imacs, itunes...

Furthermore, the news recently for apple has been fairly decent:
- they were successful against the NMPA against raising music royalties
- they successfully launched a new ipod and iphone with the other phone and palm manufacturers playing catchup at the moment
- there is positive speculation of a rumoured under $1000 laptop

So to answer my initially question:
Yes Piers, the stock market is indeed a weird world!