It also gives Apple PR an extra day to get their message out due to the US financial system being closed for Martin Luther King Day. With analysts and financial reporters off of work, Apple is likely to receive fewer calls for explanation.

Just to be pedantic:

What exactly is the value that should be substituted for the variable $AAPL? :P

$AAPL is used on twitter to talk about stocks, just like # is used for hashtags. Like $AAPL, $GOOG, $MSFT ... etc

Ah, Twitter. What symbol will you appropriate next?

Probably %

@astrodust - Perhaps the @ sign? :-)

I actually just looked up hash tags on Wikipedia, and was surprised to see that the asterisk is starting to be used to give out "stars" and ratings to items: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)#Star_tags

So I guess so far, microblogging has appropriated at least four symbols: @, #, $ and *. That leaves: !, %, ^, &, and ().

Could it be... interrobang‽

Why is that necessary? Why not just use the symbol? I'd think that $ appears in too many non-stock contexts to really be a useful filtering mechanism.

IIRC, it's because of StockTwits. http://stocktwits.com/

348.48 at the moment, according to google finance.

NASDAQ is closed, holiday. DAX (Germany) is in business hours though, and the stocks fell ~7% immediately http://www.finanzen.net/aktien/Apple-Aktie and then flattened out.

Expect something similar when NASDAQ opens again.

Sounds like a good bargain to buy on tomorrow's drops

Yeah, It will go up and this situation shows why Tim Cook is so vital to Apple's future.

Exactly. Many people freak out when Jobs is away, but Cook + team (ie. Forstall, Mansfield, Johnson) proved themselves last time Jobs was away for an extended period of time.

I'd always be interested to know who would run the company if Jobs stepped down (he'd probably stay until he couldn't, given his drive) - my bet would be Ive.

I think they would mimic the current situation with Cook running the company and Ive doing the product development. What their actual titles would be is anyones guess. Cook's lieutenants are going to be very important.

I hope this is just the effects of the transplant per the NYT article. It would make sense given the compensastion they are giving Cook.

It's a holiday.