MSFT, GOOG and AAPL: The Stock Market Three-Step
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 2, 2009 at 2:43 PM PT
Of all the tech stocks to watch, perhaps none have been more interesting to follow than those of Microsoft, Google and Apple in recent days.
With so much news emanating from this trio of tech icons, their shares have been gyrating and twisting on each and every piece of information, including:
Microsoft (MSFT) and its many new products, from Windows 7 to the Bing search service.
Google (GOOG), which has never met a launch it did not tout in a blog post, from Google Wave to its Android efforts in the smart-phone market.
Apple (AAPL), of course, which gets a mass of coverage every time the company clears its throat. The noise everyone is listening for now, as you might have guessed, is any shred of news about the new tablet, whose name–a BoomTown educated guess only–is going to be iSlate.
So, here are some things of note about the stocks:
Like Silicon Valley Bobbsey Twins, Apple and Google are neck and neck with regard to their market valuation, each hovering in the $169 billion to $170 billion range. (Microsoft’s stock is still much bigger at $247.6 billion.)
Apple’s shares have been tamped down over the last month, up only 2.4 percent, compared with a 10.2 percent rise for Google and an 11.7 percent rise for Microsoft. That said, Apple fared a lot better than Yahoo (YHOO), which was down 5.9 percent for the month.
But, year-to-date, Apple’s stock performance still reigns supreme, up 121.8 percent, compared with Google (73.6 percent) and Microsoft (43.4 percent).
For the week, though, they are all down–Apple is off 6.5 percent over the last five days, while Google is down 3.6 percent and Microsoft declined slightly less, 2.8 percent.
Here’s a chart of the three stocks below, over the last month (click on it to make the image larger):
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
