[keithwinstein]

This renewed focus on market capitalization (and "valuation") has gotten a bit absurd. Market capitalization is an _approximate_ measure of _implied_ whole-company value. Approximate because we don't really know the number of shares outstanding, and whether you should use shares outstanding or fully-diluted equity, or heck, fully-diluted equity net of cash, depends on the application. It's also approximate because the share price only reflects the last trade or the inside quote. But that is only the price that _somebody_ (the most aggressive buyer or seller) was willing to pay/accept; if you wanted to buy or sell lots of shares (e.g. a whole company) obviously you wouldn't get the inside quote for all of it.

Most fundamentally, from a corporate perspective it's not like the company "loses" anything on its balance sheet when its shares change hands at a particular price. The share price does affect the company's cost of capital, but not so simply and not directly. Apple in particular is not going to need cash any time soon.

The more relevant measures of corporate health are the traditional revenue, net income, free cash flow, etc. It's true we don't get updates to those quantities every microsecond but they are still more important.

To the extent a 6% drop might reflect somebody somewhere with groundbreaking secret information that casts Apple's future income in doubt who has decided to place a big bet, yeah, it's possible, but it's too soon to tell and we don't really know what it means. (As Steve Jobs said, "Stocks go up and down.")