Lots of chatter about how this weekend's Barron's cover features a gleaming new Lifesavers-shaped headquarters on the cover with a feature story about why it's destined to be the first $1 trillion company.
All the usual smartasses are offering commentary about how this is "the kiss of death" or "marks the top" or whatever. Barron's, like every other investor, sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong. They've made huge, important calls, like the top of the Dot Com Bubble and they've had some notable whiffs, like the infamous "Facebook is worth $15" cover from September 2012.
They're no more likely or unlikely to get everything right all the time than anyone else is. It takes a certain child-like sort of mindset to expect otherwise.
There are no serious professionals who change their portfolio allocations based on magazine cover indicators.
People who were already predisposed to agreeing with the premise of a Barron's cover story will enjoy the confirmation it offers. Those who were already predisposed to have the opposite opinion will hold it up as evidence that the current trend has reached the end of the line.
If you hated Apple stock (or, more realistically, hated yourself for missing its run), then you get to parade around on social media offering this cover up as proof that you're about to be right. Unfortunately, there is no signal here. If you end up being right, it won't be because an editor assigned a story to a financial journalist.
Let's go back a few years to a Barron's cover that generated all manner of hate, dismissal, schadenfreude, snark, sarcasm and sardonicism:
