Why does AAPL trade at such low multiples?
This is also an opinion, the iPhone makes up too much of the company's total revenue.  Last quarter results were very well received because of the somewhat dramatic increase in service revenue indicating that maybe the company can shift from relying so heavily on the iPhone.  As it stands, Apple is a single product company and that hinders long term prospects, hence the relatively low multiple. And the company has missed estimates, in fact one of those large dips was an earnings miss.  Additionally, if you're looking at the charts another one of the recent dips was likely caused by the brexit vote because everything was clobbered for a couple of days after that. "This is an opinion, but I think it has more to do with the market's uncertainty about the long-term future of the company without Steve Jobs.  Apple hasn't released anything more than incremental upgrades to its existing product lines since Jobs passed, and while some people would argue about the Apple watch, Jobs played a significant role in its development prior to his death, so that doesn't really count. Whether you like or hate Apple, you had to admire Jobs' passion and creativity, and there's real question as to whether the company can sustain its dominance in the market without the Jobs vision over the long haul.  My guess is that the market is leaning slightly toward the ""no"" column, but only ever so slightly.  The company continues to deliver fantastic results, but how long will that last of their next products don't wow consumers the way previous ones have?  This skepticism manifests itself in a stock that trades at a lower P/E than it deserves to, but this is just my opinion.   I hope this helps. Good luck!"
That metric is not very useful for anything other than very extremely long trading periods. Most strategies or concerned with price movement over much shorter time frames, 15 mins, 1 hr, 4 hr, daily, weekly, monthly. The MA or moving average is a trend following lagging indicator used to smooth out price fluctuations and more accurately reflect the price of trading instrument such as a stock (AAPL), commodity, or currency pair. Traders are generally concerned with current market trends and price action of the instrument they are trading. As such, an extremely long MA (average daily price, over a period of 365 days) are generally not that important. Excellent, very sharp. No it will not be vega neutral exactly! If you think about it, what does a higher vol imply? That the delta of the option is higher than under BS model. Therefore, the vega should also be greater (simplistic explanation but generally accurate). So no, if you trade a 25-delta risky in equal size per leg, the vega will not be neutral. But, in reality, that is a very small portion of your risk. It plays a part, but in general the vanna position dominates by many many multiples.  What do you do that you asked such a question, if you don't mind? Sharpe ratio can work but is often too complex for retail traders.  Consider using R-Multiples, where R is the amount risked on the trade. If you're risking 100 and you make 200, that's a 2R trade.  There's no right R multiple and it's dependent on your trading style.  Van Tharp's books help describe it better. "I feel that OP's question is fundamentally wrong and an understanding of why is important. The stock market, as a whole, in the USA has an average annualized return of 11%. That means that a monkey, throwing darts at a board, can usually turn 100K into over three million in thirty-five years. (The analog I'm drawing is a 30-year old with 100K randomly picking stocks will be a multi-millionaire at 65). So to be ""good"" at investing in the stock market, you need to be better than a monkey. Most people aren't. Why? What mistakes do people make and how do you avoid them? A very common mistake is to buy high, sell low. This happened before and after the 08's recession. People rushed into the market beforehand as it was reaching its peak, sold when the market bottomed out then ignored the market in years it was getting 20+% returns. A Bogle approach for this is to simply consistently put a  part of your income into the market whether it is raining or shining. Paying high fees. Going back to the monkey example, if the monkey charges you a 2% management fees, which is low by Canadian standards, the monkey will cost you one million dollars over the course of the thirty-five years. If the monkey does a pretty good job it is a worthy expenditure. But most humans, including professional stock pickers, are worst than a monkey at picking stocks. Another mistake is adjusting your plan. Many people, when the market was giving bull returns before the 08's crash happily had a large segment of their wealth in stocks. They thought they were risk tolerant. Crash happened, they moved towards bonds. Then bonds returns were comically low while stocks soared. Had they had a plan, almost any consistent plan, they'd have done better. Another genre of issues is just doing stupid things. Don't buy that penny stock. Don't trade like crazy. Don't pay 5$ commission on a 200$ stock order. Don't fail to file your taxes.  Another mistake, and this burdens a lot of people, is that your long-term investments are for long-term investing. What a novel idea. You're 401K doesn't exist for you to get a loan for a home. Many people do liquidate their long-term savings. Don't. Especially since people who do make these loans or say ""I'll pay myself back later"" don't." "If any one thing says ""big move,"" it's that' AAPL is approaching $100 (approximately a split and dividend adjusted all-time high).  Stocks act weird around big numbers - but if you could count on just a few things in trading, it's that if AAPL moves past $100, it won't just move a couple more bucks - it will move convincingly higher." Because the HFT bought them in response to the guy buying. The HFT was only able to get them faster because his server and internet connection were faster. That in combination with the fact that they intentionally just spray the exchange with a huge combination of buys. If they don't have anyone on the hook, they just cancel.   So the HFT sends the exchange a bunch of buy orders. They know 99.9 won't match up with a guy who's looking to buy and cancel them. However, when they get a guy on the hook they let that one go through and don't cancel it.   A traditional market maker doesn't do that. They let all the orders go through and charge a higher price when someone wants it. However, this is accepted as fair because they're providing volume. They're making sure that buyers and sellers will have an active market. So it's expect that they should be able to profit for having that convenience.  When a HFT can cancel their orders at will they're not providing volume.  It's not uncommon for a market maker to buy as many shares as possible and then force you to pay more for it. However, they give people the ability to buy or sell shares.   HFT don't do this. They are fast enough to cancel buy orders unless they have a buyer on the hook. As a result they can be a market maker without any losses. That would be one thing, but they don't provide the market with liquidity. They just dump the shares as soon as they're done taking their haircut (tax). Oh really. I will have to check into that. It would be a bummer if that is the case. Something I will need to look into. If you don't need margin and are not trading the underlying asset (which I could see being a problem), then I don't see what the problem is. But I shall see. Thanks. I have heard of this, but then the broker is short the shares if they weren't selling them out of inventory, so they still want to accumulate the shares or a hedge before EOD most likely - In that case it may not be the client themselves, but that demand is hitting the market at some point if there isn't sufficient selling volume.    Whether or not the broker ends up getting all of them below VWAP is a cost of marketing for them, how they expect to reliably get real size below vwap is my question.