him getting shares is an incentive. There is no incentive if it cause the price to drop materially
This is a common practise among listed companies, including locally. There may be restriction on when he can sell those shares too e.g. he can only sell every 2 years. This then motivates him to do an amazing job, so that the share price goes up, and when he is able to sell he can cash in more than if he had done a poor job.
The price might drop if he started selling those shares. People might be inclined to suspect that something was up, and follow suit and bail out, driving the price lower. Even though he could just be inclined to take some profit. This would probably only amount to some short term volatility (emotions etc.) but in the long term, the share price will ultimately be determined by how well the company performs. This all boils down to how much it sells versus how much it costs to operate. In a round about way, it seems that the article implies that the "pros" (which are what, the traders?) are recommending a buy (possibly for the short term - 1-2 years) because they forsee alot of sales coming out of china in the near term. Investors might be concerned with the longer term outlook because Apple needs to keep coming up with new products to maintain its curent status. IMO is takes alot more than Steve Jobs to do what apple has done, and I dont expect that he alone was the only innovative person at Apple. I would expect innovation and boundry pushing to be part of the culture and to be frank, the new CEO may actually do a better job of running the company than the popular figurehead that was Steve Jobs.
If I had apple stock, I'd hold on.
Edit: I also think this article is poorly written!
"Translation: For every dollar you spend on Apple, you should expect roughly the same earnings as you would get on the average company."
WHICH IS HOW MUCH EXACTLY?
