Apple's Share-Price Target Boosted by Goldman (Update 3)

Updated from 12:02 p.m. EST to provide share price performance in 2011 and first week in 2012 in the seventh paragraph, along with today's share price performance.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's earnings season, and Goldman Sachs is raising the stakes on Apple(AAPL), lifting its price target on the tech giant to $550. Goldman's new price target coincided with Apple hitting a new 52-week high on Monday. Shares of the iPhone maker, which will report earnings on Jan. 24, spiked briefly to $427.38 shortly after the market opened, surpassing its previous 52-week high of $426.70. Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope raised his price target to $550 from $520 and reiterated his Conviction List buy rating based on expectations for strong iPhone sales in the December quarter. Shope raised his iPhone sales estimate to 31.0 million from 30.2 million, an annual growth rate of 91%. Goldman's target sits above the 12-month median price target on Apple shares of $510, according to Yahoo! Finance. The top price target on Apple is $700, from Hudson Square's Daniel Ernst. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster and Ticonderoga Securities' Brian White are also exceptionally high on Apple, with $607 and $666 price targets, respectively. "For the December quarter, we now forecast overall revenues of $38.18 billion and EPS of $9.94, versus consensus of $38.28 billion and $9.87 and our prior estimates of $37.06 billion and $9.44," Shope wrote in his note. Shope expects Apple's Mac line to continue to defy the weakness seen in the PC market, led by the MacBook Air, which he believes will continue to drive "hefty notebook share gains for the company in coming quarters." Apple shares were among the best gainers in 2011, gaining almost 26% during the year. The stock is up 4.6% so far in 2012, changing hands at $423.50, up $1.10. Of the 54 analysts covering Apple. 49 rate the stock at either strong buy (24) or buy (25) with the remainder split between hold (3), undperform (1) and sell (1), according to Thomson Reuters. Interested in more on Apple? See TheStreet Ratings' report card for this stock. Check out our new tech blog, Tech Trends. --Written by Chris Ciaccia in New York >To follow the writer on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/commodity_bull. >To submit a news tip, send an email to: tips@thestreet.com>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints

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Mundane dark matter may lurk in starry clusters

DARK matter - the mysterious substance thought to make up about 80 per cent of the universe's matter - could be more mundane than thought. Inside balls of stars known as globular clusters, at least.

Unless we have misunderstood gravity, dark matter must be there - holding rotating galaxies together. But we don't know what it is. Initially, it was thought to be planets and stars too dim to be seen directly. Such objects would reveal themselves when they pass in front of bright stars, distorting the image with their gravity, but the objects turned up by such "microlensing" searches in our galaxy have not revealed nearly enough matter. So it is assumed that dark matter is something more exotic, such as novel theoretical particles.

Now, Pawel Pietrukowicz of Warsaw University in Poland and colleagues have spotted a tiny star in the globular cluster M22 acting as a lens for a background star. At just 0.18 times the sun's mass, it is the smallest star ever seen in a globular cluster. Because its effects on the larger star were seen after just 10 weeks of observations, the team says there are probably many more like it in the cluster, perhaps even enough to account for all the dark matter needed to hold the cluster together. The work will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

While exotic dark matter is still needed outside of globular clusters, knowing that it might not be needed in this one, and perhaps others like it, could give clues to the stuff's properties. Turn to page 30 for more on dark matter

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