As I noted that day, the timing of the rumor seemed a bit suspicious. With little in the way of news during the holiday week, Jobs’s decision to bail on the Macworld keynote issue still fresh in our minds and his health an obvious shareholder concern, it seemed a bit like an AAPL manipulator’s perfect storm.

Apparently, there may be a bit more to that armchair theory than I thought. Over at Traderhood, writers with far more stock analysis acumen than I, suggest that Apple shares were poised for a huge breakout in price the afternoon of Dec. 30, bolstered by a general upward trend in the market and their own ascending triangle (click on chart below) when they very suspiciously had the wind knocked out of them. “Amazingly at the very point where AAPL’s spike at the tip of the ascending triangle should happen, rumor was introduced and killed the setup completely,” Traderhood blogger Conschmillo explains. “I mean you can have things to happen unexpectedly. It happens all the time, it is a stock market, but to have them placed this [precisely] when everything else is taking off, AAPL included, makes me believe, there is more than meets the eye to why AAPL price is down. If this rumor was not introduced, AAPL would be somewhere around $93.”

So, a favorable technical set-up was thwarted at the moment the odds favored the opposite happening. Coincidence?

UPDATE: Apparently, it was a coincidence. Brian Lam, Editorial Director of Gizmodo, which published the rumor, tells me the site was tipped off well before Dec. 30.

[Image credit: Tin foil hat courtesy Patrick Daley]

(Thanks Barry )

Now, Net Applications cautions that the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage, which increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So perhaps the IE’s lower usage during the month was a bit more pronounced than it might otherwise have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that its reign is clearly in decline. In January of 2007, IE held nearly 80 percent market share; now it holds 68.15. Still, the lion’s share of the market, but a share that has slipped nearly 15 percent in just two years, (click on chart below) and given recent news, seems certain to slip further in the months ahead.

Clearly, the so-called IPO window has been slammed shut by the capital crisis. Indeed, data from Dealogic show that 298 IPOs were postponed or withdrawn over the past 11 months–quite a few more than the 167 that met that fate in all of the 2007. And those companies that went through with their offerings didn’t fare so well. Almost 50 percent of new issues fell on their first day of trading, and aftermarket performance was poor, according to Renaissance Capital; the average new issue was down 38 percent by year-end.

“Performance of 2008 new issues in the US was abysmal by historical standards, although not surprising given the steep decline in equities,” says Renaissance. “The average first day pop was a paltry 2%, down from the more than 10% average first day return investors became accustomed to in each of the last five years. A whopping 58% of all new issues traded down in their market debut, the worst first day showing in at least a decade and almost four times the IPO market’s 10-year average.”

Little wonder, then, that the U.S. went three months without an IPO during the second half of the year–the longest dry spell since the recession of the 1970s.

When will the IPO market return? Tough to say. Renaissance says there’s a lot of pent-up demand by potential issuers to raise equity capital. But they’re not likely to test the IPO waters until the financial markets stabilize.

In three years or so when Facebook finally settles on a business model. Assuming, of course, that it’s a viable one. And that it doesn’t send privacy advocates into paroxysms of angry status updates.

In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trotted out the old “growth over profits” cliché as explanation for the company’s long-absent business model. “… what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I’m pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today. … Growth is primary, revenue is secondary.”

Yeah. Tell that to the stock market …

[Image Credit: The Onion]