Apple surges 6% on AI offering as shares hit new all-time record
- Apple stock popped to a new all-time high above $205.
- Former all-time high for AAPL came in December 2023.
- CEO Tim Cook showed off Apple Intelligence at developer conference.
- AI offering is a partnership between Apple and OpenAI.
- DA Davidson raised its AAPL price target to $230.
Apple (AAPL) unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy on Monday, and by the looks of it, the market is warming to the product suite. Apple stock advanced more than 6% on Tuesday morning to an all-time high above $205. This surpassed the December 14, 2023 high of $199.62.
This has pushed the tech-heavy NASDAQ up 0.17% at the time of writing, while the S&P 500 retracts a similar percentage and the Dow Jones gives up 0.5%.
Apple stock news
CEO Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Intelligence platform at Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Cook said Apple’s veneer on the technology that has become the focus of many tech companies over the past two years would be a user-specific and simplified approach.
Apple had received some criticism that it was late to the game in regard to AI, but management took the view that it was more important to build a user-friendly interface that allows owners of iPads and iPhones to generate original artwork and summarize text more personally. Additionally, the company is updating its Siri digital assistant and integrating it with Apple Intelligence.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President in charge of software development, referred to Apple Intelligence as “AI for the rest of us,” and the catch phrase appears to be sticking.
Apple formally announced its partnership with OpenAI, which will power its AI platform. User will have access to Chat GPT for free, but paying users will have access to more features in the future. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft (MSFT).
DA Davidson raised its outlook on Apple from Neutral to Buy and hiked its $200 price target to $230. Analysts at DA Davidson wrote that Apple Intelligence could beckon a new iPhone upgrade cycle.
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.
Apple stock forecast
Not only has Tuesday's rally upended the six-month old all-time high from last December, but it also surpassed the resistance level of $196, which held back in January. Since last December, AAPL stock has found support at $164 and $180, but a new uptrend appears to have begun.
Since May 2, the 9-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) has been running ahead of its 20-day EMA counterpart, so savvy traders were likely in this trade early.
AAPL stock is once again in overbought territory at 72 on the Relative Strength Index (RSI), but this has been the case, off and on, for about five weeks. While jumping here is probably ill-advised, a pullback is unlikely until AAPL reaches a further overbought level closer to 80. Expect Apple to use the former all-time high at $199.62 as support sometime later this year.
AAPL daily stock chart
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Author
Clay Webster
FXStreet
Clay Webster grew up in the US outside Buffalo, New York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He began investing after college following the 2008 financial crisis.
