Apple Is Scheduled To Report After Market Close -- October 20, 2014

Updates

Later, 6:14 p.m. CDT: you gotta love this Reuters headline -  "Apple sales beat Street (estimates) but iPad volumes slide." They must have missed the October 16, 2014, Apple presentation. iPads volumes may have slipped but still a stunning story.

Later, 4:04 p.m. CDT: wow, it's so much fun going back and reading all the negative comments about Apple. Freudenschade, I believe, is the word. Not the best word, but close enough. At $1.42 far exceeded estimates, and "guides strongly."
 
HAL also blew away earnings estimates at $1.19; raises dividend. What's not to like?

I guess Flowserve did not report today. Moved to October 23rd, I see.

Remember: the next time AAPL reports, it will include the holidays and ALL of Apple's new products and upgrades are already available or will be available by then, except, the AppleWatch, due to come out in 2015, I believe. Could be wrong. Often am.

Original Post

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According to Yahoo!Finance:

• Apple, expectations: $1.31 ($9.17 pre-split), after market close
• Flowserve, expectations: $1.00, after market close
• Halliburton, expections: $1.10; actual -- Net income rose 70 percent to $1.2 billion, or $1.41 a share, from $706 million, or 79 cents, a year earlier, Houston-based Halliburton said in a statement today. Excluding one-time items, the company earned $1.19 a share, 9 cents more than the average of 31 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales rose 16 percent to a record $8.7 billion. 
• IBM with big miss; expectations: $4.32 (actual, see below): drops 7%; CEO abandons 2015 earnings forecast; this is not an industry-wide issue; IBM "is struggling to transform fast enough to handle the shift to cloud computers." IBM's earnings:

Third-quarter adjusted earnings from continuing operations were $3.68 a share, down from $4.08 a year earlier. Including the loss from discontinued operations, the company had profit of 2 cents a share. Revenue fell 4 percent to $22.4 billion, the 10th straight quarterly drop, weighed down by declines in its hardware division and in emerging markets.

The cloud? "Everyone" was doing 'the cloud' before Apple, I suppose, but Apple a) popularized it for the consumer; b) was responsible for educating the consumer with its slick, easy-to-understand iCloud commercials; and, c) provided software engineers with the tools to make some really, really cool apps that make the iCloud so incredibly wonder. The most interesting: "Continuity." [I assume iCloud is the link for "Continuity" but could be wrong.]

By the way, the demo at the "Continuity" link above shows something else Apple is doing that is also transformational in the world of marketing for Apple. That link, by the way, doesn't actually show what "Continuity" does despite the headline. Here's a better link for "Continuity":

Apple's Continuity
More on "Continuity" and iCloud here.

And this video confirms that Apple-Pay is going to be transformational. Or is it "transformative?" Whatever. A game changer.  The best part about it: no credit card seen by anyone.