I had three tabs open before 9am this morning: my email, a chart of the Dow that I refreshed every ninety seconds like it might say something different each time, and a Google Doc I was actually supposed to be writing in for a client. Guess which one got the least attention.
If you've been anywhere near a screen today you already know the market opened ugly. Futures had been flashing red all weekend over what's happening with China's stock market, and by the time the opening bell rang in New York the Dow was down well over a thousand points inside the first few minutes. It clawed back a good chunk of that by the close, but for about twenty minutes right around 9:35 my Twitter feed was just people either panicking or making jokes about panicking, which at that point is basically the same activity.
Apple got hit especially hard, and that's the part I actually want to write about, because I own something like four shares of it in an old brokerage account I forget exists until mornings like this one. AAPL was down double digits at the open before settling into a smaller, still-bad loss by the close. And somewhere in the middle of that mess, Tim Cook did something CEOs basically never do: he emailed a reporter, mid-crash, to say things were fine.
Not a press release. Not a scheduled call with analysts three weeks out. An actual email to Jim Cramer, read live on CNBC, where Cook said he checks China numbers personally, every day, and that July and August had shown continued strength for the business there, and that whatever the market was doing that morning didn't match what he was actually seeing in the sales data. Cramer read it on air. The stock ticked up not long after. I have no idea if that's cause and effect or just a headline pretending to be one, but the timing was something.
I keep turning over how strange that is as corporate behavior. Companies usually let the silence do the talking during a bad news cycle and save the actual comment for the quarterly call, after three days of lawyers vetting every clause. Cook apparently wrote something like six sentences and sent it before lunch. That's a real break from the script, and I'll say it plainly: I think it was smart. Not brave, not some grand gesture, just smart, because he's the CEO of the most valuable company on the exchange and letting a China panic he thinks is overblown sit unanswered for three more weeks would've cost more than the thirty seconds it took to type that email.
None of this has anything to do with it, except that it happened to me in the same hour, but my laptop also popped up the Get Windows 10 reminder again this morning, the little icon that lives in the system tray whether you asked for it or not. I've already declined it twice this month and it keeps coming back like it forgot our last two conversations entirely. I closed it, went back to watching the Dow chart do its thing, closed that, and then reopened the Windows nag by accident because my cursor was still parked right on top of it. Genuinely one of the least productive mornings I've had at this desk in a while, and I write here often enough to have a decent sample size for that claim.
I don't have some tidy read on where the market goes from here, and I'm not going to pretend the four shares of Apple in that dusty account make me anyone worth listening to on the subject. But watching a CEO skip the entire normal playbook because the market was moving faster than the playbook allows for was, to me, the actual story of the day. The closing number on the Dow I've already half forgotten. The six sentences Cook sent Cramer before lunch, I remember exactly.