Steve Jobs employed a number of master strategies to make Apple the company it is today. Slowly Apple has been abandoning Jobs’ strategies that had made Apple successful. Steve Jobs was a master of a strategy known as UPOD. UPOD stands for under promise and over deliver. Now Apple has officially announced that it is abandoning UPOD.
A very long time ago, I learned the hard way how Steve Jobs masterfully employed UPOD. I was listening to him on an earnings conference call. My finger was on the trigger to buy Apple or short it for a very short-term trade based on its earnings projections.
The concept was that I would buy if the projections were higher than the whisper numbers or I would short if the projections were lower than the whisper numbers.
In the latter part of the conference call, Apple gave its guidance for the next quarter; the guidance was significantly below the whisper numbers. Within a few milliseconds, I had short sold a very large quantity of Apple stock. To my dismay, right after my shorts filled, Apple started moving up strongly. Fortunately I had stops. Stops hit and I lost a fair amount of money. If I did not have stops, and left the trade for a week my losses would have been about 1,500% higher.
For over 30 years, my habit has been to carefully analyze every trade especially if I lost money. The purpose of the analysis is to learn from the mistake….Read more at Forbes
