I don't think it's true that "the stock market disagrees that Apple is doing great". Apple is valued at over 400 billion dollars by the stock market. Maybe you

I don't think it's true that "the stock market disagrees that Apple is doing great". Apple is valued at over 400 billion dollars by the stock market. Maybe you mean that the price of Apple stock fell in some period t0 to t1, but that certainly doesn't mean the stock market is saying Apple is doing badly. That might simply mean the stock market updated its predictions on how Apple is going to do in the future. Also, every stock has some degree of volatility. Take any stock and you'll find periods that the stock went up or down. In the case of Apple, if you look at the 5-year period finishing the increase has been 270%, way over the Nasdaq average. > I think all this hype on stocks is a pump-and-dump operation, played by the big investment banks. "They" buy lots of shares, start the fire with $1000 price targets from their own analysts and when the price is high enough, they dump it, leaving some retail investor holding the bag. Sorry, but this is naive. It's not feasible to manipulate the market over several months that way. In most cases, the biggest shareholders are the company's founders and management, mutual and pension funds, and hedge funds. They would need to do a lot of (very illegal) conspiring in order to pull out that sort of thing. E.g. they would have to agree not to start selling off until a certain date. Although illegal trading certainly does happen, that's usually via insider information (e.g. the investment banking division obtains secret information from Apple, and leaks it to the prop trading division). In this case, retail investors can get screwed, but so do all the banks and funds who aren't in the know. If you're a retail investor, the way you lose money to brokers and market makers is typically by trading too much and thereby paying too many fees, and paying the spread too many times. Another way you lose money is when the company board & management screws you (e.g. by overpaying management, or by liberally issuing too much stock thereby diluting yours).