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Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO but named company chairman

Steve Job 300x198 Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO but named company chairman

Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc. and driving force behind a string of products that revolutionized the consumer-electronics industry, stepped down as chief executive but was named chairman of the board, the company said late Wednesday.

His relinquishing of daily control had been widely anticipated since he took an extended medical leave earlier this year. Jobs, 56, had a liver transplant two years ago and underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer seven years ago.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” he wrote in a letter to the board Wednesday. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Nevertheless, the announcement stirred doubts about Apple’s future, given Jobs’ deep personal association with its most successful innovations, including the Macintosh computer line, the iPod portable music player and the iPhone smartphone.

Apple shares dropped in after-hours trading by nearly $20, or about 5%, immediately after the news broke.

Apple named Tim Cook, the company’s well-regarded operations chief who had run the company in Jobs’ absence, as chief executive.

Though Apple has a deep reservoir of technological talent at its Cupertino, Calif., campus, investors have long worried that it could be impossible to replace Jobs’ intuitive ability to anticipate tech trends and craft products that resonate with consumers.

“He’s the head visionary,” said Jeffrey Fidacaro, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group. “Can you replace his vision, his passion for the products, his rigor in the day-to-day operations? That’s going to be hard, it’s undeniable.”

Others said Apple won’t have to grapple with that issue as long as Jobs remains chairman of Apple.

“He has this higher level of mind that he can see the future clearly in a way that few people can. That rubs off on people,” said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. “But Apple’s a lot of people. And in the meantime, he’ll still be there, still watching over it and within reach if needed.”

Under Jobs, Apple has become one of the most successful and recognizable companies in modern American history — and, in recent years, a closely watched weather vane of global consumer preferences and spending habits.

Jobs and Wozniak financed the original Apple Computer with $1,300 they raised from the sale of Jobs’ Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak’s Hewlett-Packard Co. scientific calculator. They built their first machines in Jobs’ family garage in 1976.

In 1984, they introduced the Macintosh, the first personal computer to implement features that are now commonplace on all personal computers, including the mouse and graphical user interface.

Jobs left in 1985 after losing a boardroom showdown with then-CEO John Sculley — later starting his own company dubbed NeXT. Wozniak also left that year. Jobs returned to Apple as an advisor in late-1996 when the company bought NeXT. He later became chief executive again, quickly setting out to remake a company that was close to bankruptcy.

His first innovation was the introduction in 1998 of the iMac, whose translucent blue exterior stood out from the legions of beige personal computers.

Apple introduced a blockbuster product in 2001: the iPod. Although not the first consumer MP3 player, Apple broke ground by integrating the device with easy-to-use software for organizing music playlists, as well as an online store for purchasing tracks. The powerful combination transformed the digital music market.

Beyond its technological prowess, Apple has consistently notched impressive profits that have propelled its stock price to astronomical levels.

Its stock price hit $403.41 in July — a near-60% gain from a year earlier — after executives released better-than-expected third-quarter earnings. That put Apple’s market value at $374 billion, briefly toppling Exxon Mobil Corp. as the world’s most valuable firm. A decade earlier the stock traded at $10.

On Wednesday, Apple’s shares rose $2.58 to $376.18. They fell to about $356 in after-hours trading.

Central Banks Seen Retaining Gold to Help Manage Debt as Bullion Advances

Central banks, net buyers of gold for the first time in a generation, are likely to retain their holdings even if they need to raise cash to counter an escalating debt crisis, according to Morgan Stanley.

“Once they’ve sold, that’s it, and buying back would be extremely expensive,” Peter Richardson, chief metals economist at

Morgan Stanley Australia Ltd., said in an interview. “They would rather have the backing of a rising asset within their reserve portfolios than use it to reduce debt.”

Gold rallied to a record this week as rising government debt burdens and weakening currencies boosted demand for a haven. Central banks are the biggest gold holders, and Thailand, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Russia added to reserves this year. The precious metal is the “currency of the world” amid the debt crisis, economist Dennis Gartman wrote Aug. 19.

“Under conditions of austerity we’re going to see a further deterioration of debt,” said Richardson, who has studied metals markets for 20 years. “Rising risk argues in favor of holding on to their gold reserves rather than selling them because they’ve only got one shot at selling.”

Immediate-delivery gold, which has rallied 30 percent this year, touched an all-time high of $1,913.50 per ounce yesterday and was at $1,846.07 by 12:02 p.m. in London. The metal may reach $2,000 by the end of the year, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 13 traders and analysts at a conference in Kovalam in South India on Aug. 20.

Currency Credibility

“The European central banks won’t sell their gold because while it may be a means to raise cash, it definitely won’t be enough to settle their debts,” said Duan Shihua, head of corporate services at Haitong Futures Co., China’s largest brokerage by registered capital. “Besides, none of the central banks believe in the currencies of other countries.”

In 2010, central banks became net buyers for the first time in two decades, adding 87 metric tons in purchases by countries including Bolivia and Mauritius, according to World Gold Council data. In the second quarter of 2011, central bank and government-institution buying rose almost fivefold to 69.4 tons, taking the first-half total to 192.3 tons, the council said last week. The banks will remain net buyers this year, it said.

Central banks have been “active buyers” of gold in recent months, Edel Tully, an analyst at UBS AG, wrote in a note to clients on Aug. 8. The banks should also buy platinum as they boost gold holdings amid concern about the global economy, Citigroup Inc. said in a report the same day.

Credit-Rating Downgrades

The debt crisis in Europe that started in Greece has hobbled economic growth and prompted downgrades of the credit ratings of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Still, the euro has strengthened against the currencies of 14 of 16 trading partners this year as the European Central Bank bought government bonds.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday rejected a call by Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen for states to put up gold as collateral for emergency loans. That disagreement may underscore risks over a second Greek aid package.

In August 2009, central banks in Europe agreed to a third five-year cap on gold sales. The European Central Bank and 18 others agreed to sell no more than a combined 400 tons a year through September 2014. Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the European Central Bank, Portugal, Spain and Austria are among the top 20 holders, according to council data.

IMF Sales

“Notwithstanding the worst sovereign-debt crisis, particularly in Europe, where there are very large, concentrated holdings of gold, the central-bank agreement has been striking by the fact the only people who have been selling has been the IMF,” said Richardson, referring to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund.

The IMF sold 403.3 tons between October 2009 and December 2010 as part of a plan to shore up its finances and lend at reduced rates to low-income countries. More than half of that was acquired by central banks, according to the fund.

The Bank of Korea, which purchased 25 tons over a one-month period from June to July, said “holding gold helps reduce investment risks in terms of reserve management,” according to a statement earlier this month after the move was disclosed.

To contact the reporter on this story: Glenys Sim in Singapore at gsim4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Poole at jpoole4@bloomberg.net

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The Art Of The Forex Scam 2

Today, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to give you a few tips on how you can avoid getting scammed by those who make a living, not from trading, but from marketing a defunct product or service. I’ll also be discussing in more depth concerning the different types of scammers out there.

Today, we’ll be focusing on the repainting indicator scam.

When Metatrader really became mainstream, during the middle of the last decade, it helped spawn a whole new breed of new forex retail traders. There were so many people jumping on the forex bandwagon, thinking it was a slick way of making a lot of money. Internet forums were buzzing with many new methods. Call it a second wave if you like. And Metatrader was the platform which helped fuel that wave. Metatrader 3 was popular, but by 2006, it was pretty much obsolete, and Metatrader 4 was the most popular trading platform.

Suprisingly, it still is, to this very day.

But what Metatrader did for the birth of new wannabe traders, it also did for new wannabe scammers. And I’m not talking about EAs. A lot of scammers realized that even though noobs were suckers for an awesome looking backtested EA, advice was being given across the net to “trade manually”.

So what better way to convince new traders to trade manually, yet still make a thousand pips a month? The repainting indicator. Except of course, they didn’t call it that.

For those of you who don’t know what exactly is a repainting indicator – typically, it’s one which, when applied to a currency chart, displays buy and sell arrows. So, when you scroll back in time through the chart, you’ll see where the indicator would have told you to buy, and where to sell. The most fascinating aspect of all of this is, every one of the historic signals turns out to be a winner. Picking tops and bottoms now could never be easier! Forget your robot EA which might go belly up at any time. Now, you the trader is in control. You press the buttons. You click on Buy Eur/Usd, you close that beautiful Cable trade. Manual trading at it’s best.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the new trader, those arrows were not the same arrows you would have seen in real time. They “repaint” the past, redraw history. If you weren’t even aware of the concept of repainting, you would quite probably think you could make serious pips. Alas, many fell for this trap, especially over at eBay, where scammers sold “super accurate arrow indicator” to make you into an “overnight super trader”.

But hang on, at just $29.99, this couldn’t be the case, surely?

Well, it surely could be, if you looked at how many the scammers have been selling. And what’s even worse, the noob then fails to leave a negative feedback, through fear of himself receiving negative feedback from the seller, or through embarrassment.

Today thankfully, the repainting scammer has almost gone into extinction, thanks to the hard efforts of forex forums, and those experienced forex traders who expose these scammers.

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