Appl

On Tuesday Apple reported a pretty solid set of financial results for Q2 fiscal 2013. Revenue was $43.6 billion, which is up 11% year over year. But it’s also fair to point out that earnings were down year over year. In fact Apple posted EPS of $10.09 which is a decline from $12.30 last year.

There are plenty of industry observers and stock market pundits who are pointing out that “Apple is not a growth company anymore”. Factually, I think it’s better to say that Apple did not achieve earnings growth this quarter. They did achieve revenue growth (and quite reasonable growth), but they didn’t grow the bottom line.

Question is - can they get back to delivering growth? I think they can and I think they will. Let’s remember this is a long term game.

Earlier this week, Mal Spooner from Money wrote a piece about the swarming of Apple stock. In the article, he equates street swarming -- when a gang surrounds and often attacks an unsuspecting victim -- to the swarming of a stock by short sellers. The main difference, he suggests, is that in a street swarming there is no real motive. Yet in a short-seller swarming, the motive is to rob investors by driving the stock price down.

Earlier today I had a quick chat with iMore’s editor-in-chief, Rene Ritchie about all the crazy rumours and bad journalism that Apple has had to deal with lately. But more to the point, we talked about how this stuff can hurt small time investors if they don’t know how to deal with it. So that’s what we’ll talk about here.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a story about hedge fund titan David Einhorn, and his firm Greenlight Capital’s view that Apple isn’t distributing enough cash to shareholders. Einhorn says Apple is behaving with a “depression-era mentality” according to the story.