Update on Market Efficiency

Our last post on the curious behavior of the AAPL stock price was a little over three weeks ago, and since it is now (approximately) two months since Apple's last quarterly report, and since some "forward looking statements" were made in the last report, AND since in the intervening period Apple has

• Announced the new iPad
• Sold a bunch of them
• Announced a dividend (for the first time since 1995) and a stock buyback.

Curiously, the stock price (at this point the run-up has been sufficient to mandate using a log plot) has been increasing almost mechanically log-linearly:

For those who care about such things, the (annualized) Sharpe ratio of an investment in Apple over this period is very close to 9(!)

What to make of this? Apparently the process of gigantic mutual funds loading up on AAPL is continuing, and its speed depends in part on the decision-making speed of the appropriate committee, and partly by the reluctance of said committees to move the market to much, so that the buy orders to their brokers are spread over weeks (of course, we all know that the market is efficient, trends do not exist, and you can only hurt yourself by acting quickly. Why, you might pull something...)