So last Monday was one of those mornings where I checked my phone before I even got out of bed, which I know, I know, is a bad habit and probably a symptom of something. But the futures were ugly and I wanted to see how ugly. Dow futures were pointing to an open down over a thousand points, and by 9:35 or so it actually happened, worst intraday swing since the 2008 mess, all triggered by fear over China's economy after that yuan devaluation a couple weeks back. Everybody's been jumpy about China all August and this was the morning it caught up with everyone at once.
I don't have much skin in the game, stock-wise. Twelve shares of Apple I bought a few years ago with a tax refund I didn't have better plans for, mostly because I figured it couldn't hurt and it felt like a fun thing to check occasionally. That Monday it was not fun to check. AAPL opened down something like 13%, which for a company with no actual bad news attached to it that morning is a genuinely bananas number. We're talking a stock that had been sitting around $103 dropping toward $92 in the first few minutes of trading, for no reason specific to Apple at all. Just panic, spreading the way panic does.
Here's the part I actually wanted to write about, because the crash itself has been covered to death already and I don't have anything smart to add about global markets. What got me was what Tim Cook did a few hours later. He emailed Jim Cramer. Directly. Like, personally wrote an email to a CNBC guy in the middle of a market freakout, and Cramer read it out loud on air like it was a hostage proof-of-life video. Cook said he gets a dashboard every day on how Apple's doing in China, and that iPhone activations there and in Hong Kong had actually picked up through July and into August, not slowed down. Basically: nothing's changed on our end, the quarter's tracking the way we already told you it would, so calm down.
And it worked. Apple clawed back a big chunk of that drop by the close. A single email, read aloud by a guy in a colorful tie, moved a company's valuation by tens of billions of dollars in the same afternoon. I keep turning that over in my head because it's such a weird little glimpse into how thin the membrane is between "the fundamentals" and "vibes." Nothing about Apple's actual business changed between 9am and noon that day. The dashboards Cook mentioned existed the day before too. The only thing that changed was that a specific, famous person said a specific, calming sentence into a specific microphone.
I don't really know what to do with that fact except find it a little unsettling. Cramer's whole shtick is yelling BUY BUY BUY or SELL SELL SELL with sound effects, and normally I'd file that under entertainment, not information. But apparently it's also a channel that a sitting Fortune 500 CEO will use, on purpose, when he wants to move a number. That's not really a knock on Cook, it was a smart, fast, low-cost move on his part and I'd probably do the same thing in his position. It's more a knock on the rest of us, or the system, for having built a marketplace where a CEO's email to a cable pundit is a more effective stabilizer than the actual quarterly numbers everyone already had access to.
Anyway. My twelve shares are fine. I didn't sell, mostly out of laziness rather than conviction, and by Wednesday the whole thing had mostly settled down like these things always seem to. CNBC's chyrons went back to normal colors. I did spend an embarrassing amount of Monday morning refreshing a stock ticker app in the kitchen instead of making coffee, so functionally the crash cost me nothing except a slightly worse cup of coffee than usual. Small price for a front-row seat to watching an email outrun an entire market's worth of algorithms for one morning.