Gene Munster Remains Bullish On Apple In His Last Research Note

Gene Munster, Wall Street’s best known Apple Watcher, is signing off as an analyst — last week saw his 874th and final research note on the company.

Unsurprisingly, Munster sees big things still to come from the tech giant.

Munster has been writing Apple notes for 12 years. His first note, The Apple Option — Predicting Another Revolution, urged investors to buy the stock. At the time, Apple stock price was $2 a share — it’s now at almost $116.  This prediction came while the iPod was first gaining ground, but the iPhone was a well-kept secret within Apple.

“Apple’s early success with the iPod will be a catalyst for transformation to an Apple with a core focus on the ways in which the market for peripheral devices can be expanded,” Munster wrote as he began to cover the company for Minneapolis brokerage firm Piper Jaffray.

It has been long considered one of the sharpest picks in the history of the market — especially because Munster was also among the first to call the decline of the desktop in favor of smart internet-connected devices.

Muster was also wrong at times — he was sure Apple was going to make a TV set and had guessed Apple would make history by being the first company with a $1 trillion market cap — but on the whole he has been considered one of the more reliably correct analysts out there during the course of his career.

In a final note, Munster and his partner Doug Clinton assessed Apple’s efforts to convince investors that it should be more highly valued due to its recurring revenues from services like iTunes music and iCloud online storage.

“Since I started covering Apple in 2004, the two core concerns from investors have always been unit growth and innovation,” Munster wrote. “Not much has changed since 2004, despite the evolution of the business from PC to mobile, and not much will change if they are not successful in making Services a bigger part of the story.”

“We don’t know what the right answer is, but we feel confident the management team will figure out the best forward path to optimize the Services story,” he wrote.

Munster remains optimistic, however. “The company can recreate that magical feeling with some future product and will enjoy watching the stock rise when they do,” he wrote. And for the record, he still rated the shares “outperform” with a price target of $155.

Munster’s next act will be in a tech investment firm.