Pretty Soon

It's a good time to update a couple of recent and rather unusual trading moves highlighted in this blog, as both are in the news today.

First, 50 Cent's strategy detailed last month doesn't appear to be too successful with CNBC today reporting that:

On Tuesday, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, traded below 10, near levels not seen since December 2006.

Trader Steve Burns reported the close yesterday as the fourth lowest ever, with only December of 1993 seeing lower:

The second was the crazy Apple (AAPL) guy from January who supposedly claimed to be making an all-in attempt to recover some losses by shorting the stock ahead of first quarter results:

He's certainly convinced himself that Apple will disappoint the market, and needs the current price of $121.63 to dip below$120 to start making some money.

At the time of writing, Apple is at 154.24 now up 33% on the year:

That $120 is looking a long way off, although the put options have likely long expired by now.

Meanwhile Apple is now valued at $800 billion, closing in on being the world's first trillion dollar company:

Apple's stock is currently trading above the $153 mark for the first time ever, after factoring in a 7-for-1 split in 2014, giving the company a record-high market cap of roughly $800 billion. That means Apple is within $200 billion of becoming the world's first trillion dollar company.

Apple analyst Brian White of Wall Street investment firm Drexel Hamilton continues to believe Apple "remains among the most under-appreciated stocks in the world," with "attractive upside" for investors. White raised his 12-month price target for Apple's stock to $202 today, up from an already bullish $185.

That twelve month price target would value Apple at $1.05 trillion. 

There's a quote attributed to US politician Everett Dirksen:

"a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money"

which sounds good. The only problem with it is that he never actually said the "pretty soon" part of the quote.

When asked about it, Dirksen said:

"Oh, I never said that. A newspaper fella misquoted me once, and I thought it sounded so good that I never bothered to deny it."