Stock watch

Clem Chambers, CEO of ADVFN, the leading stocks & shares website

While Apple is building offices that look like spaceships, back on Earth the stock market is taking a pounding. The Nasdaq hit an all-time high in July, surpassing the levels of the notorious dotcom boom and crash, but since then US markets have had a nasty fall of 11%. This is not a crash, which is generally regarded as a drop of 25%; this is correction considered to be just one of those things on the way to yet higher highs. On the day the low was much below the official close, so the actual drop intraday hit 16% off July’s top.

By that rating, Apple hit 32% off its high, its $10 recovery that afternoon to $103 masking the full extent of the rout.

Right now, Apple is $110 a share, with two further $10 peak to trough days swiping tens of billions of dollars of wealth in and out of existence. The stock market is getting wilder by the day and Apple will be a key stock in that drama.