Apple shareholders were all McKayla Maroney about the new iPhones, the 5C and 5S, introduced on Tuesday: not impressed.
As you can see from the chart below, courtesy of Yahoo Finance, Apple's stock price started bouncing around nervously as Apple executives began introducing the new products at around 1:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. But for the most part, the stock stayed fairly boringly lower.
Near the end of the event, however, a little after 2:00 p.m., the MEHstival turned uglier, and the stock fell 1.5 percent -- inspiring Business Insider to tweet that the stock was CRASHING. At its worst, the stock was down 3 percent, before recovering a little to a 2 percent decline, still snugly below the $500 share price that Wall Street's round-number fans find so important. (Story continues after chart.)
Shareholders were reportedly worried that the low-priced iPhone 5C was not quite low-priced enough to bring Apple a whole lot of new revenue. So that's one reason the stock might have fallen.
Mostly, though, the stock action is probably just standard Wall Street behavior: People buy stock in the days ahead of a well-telegraphed news event like an iPhone release, and then sell on the day of the event. Few things on earth are as slobberingly hyped as an Apple new-gadget release, so the buy-rumor/sell-news approach is child's play for hedge funds, who typically lurve them some Apple stock.
Update: Apple continued to tumble on Wednesday morning, but in even crash-ier fashion. About an hour into the trading day, the stock was down nearly 6 percent to about $466 a share, in what CNNMoney termed an "iPhlop."
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