Apple Inc (AAPL): Is Doug Kass Playing It Like a Fiddle?

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) was riding a good run this year, surging from around $400 a share all the way up to an all-time high of $705 in mid-September. But in the weeks since, the stock has ventured into “bear market” territory, where it is now trading at below its 200-day moving average and has shed more than 20 percent off the high – perilously close to 25 percent.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Toward the top, when Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) was trading at about $675, Doug Kass – president of Seabreeze Partners and one of the common “experts” called upon at CNBC – wrote a tome that highlighted 10 things that made an argument that Apple Inc (AAPL) had “lost its mojo.” It’s been a little more than a month later, and Kass seems to have been proven right, at least according to a Fortune blogger – some of the factors he cited were things that were part of the old Apple fundamentals but now are gone and can’t really be reversed – Steve Jobs, Apple’s ever-more-complex product lines, quality of products for the price, and even the iconic ecosystem itself, the model of which is beginning to be caught up by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Kass reportedly went everywhere he could to discuss Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) as often as possible, and as he noted in response to a Barron’s writer who was cynical, “Apple’s shares have dropped by $50 since my original analysis was published on TheStreet and RealMoneyPro. This has occurred in a generally upward trending market. In other words so far I have been correct on the stock.”

Well, now that he was right and most of the 10 things he mentioned previously hadn’t changed, what is he saying now? Buy, baby, buy!

“Hey, I never said it was a forbidden fruit,” he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. now that the price is more than 20 percent cheaper than went he first wrote about it, apparently it’s enough of a bargain for him to turn around and buy what he was convincing others to sell.  And to back up his “change of heart,” he noted five reasons why his bear had turned to a bull.  But the interesting thing the writer, Philip Elmer-Dewitt, noted was that none of the five “bullish” reasons to buy Apple Inc (AAPL) do not address the more permanent “bearish” factors he wrote about a month ago.

We’ll let you decide what Kass might have been thinking and what his actions suggest. But if he now thinks that Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a buy despite all he wrote in October, maybe that might mean a rally as perhaps other investors, like billionaire David Tepper of Appaloosa Management LP, will look to strengthen their positions in the bargain bin.