Apple blew away even the most optimistic forecasts yesterday, announcing earnings per share of $2.33, versus a consensus expectation of $2.16, and $1.75 last quarter.

The firm earned $13.6 billion in profits on $58 billion in gross profits, the largest quarterly profit in world history.

The company sold a staggering 61.2 million iPhone during the three-month period, 4 million more than expected. Insignificant iPad sales dropped from 13.9 to 12.6 million units. MacBook?s were in line at 4.6 million units.

No mention was made whatsoever of problems with a strong dollar.

The company now sits on n unbelievable $194 billion in cash, the equivalent of the GDP of a medium sized country. Most importantly, Apple is expanding its share buy back program to $200 billion.

Wow!

I happened to stop by my local Apple store on Friday to get my MacBook Pro fixed. Yes, they can catch viruses, despite Steve Jobs? assertions to the contrary. But then Steve didn?t know our viruses.

It was the first time I could remember when there wasn?t a giant line snaking down the street. Apple?s beef with the local city council for permanently blocking public sidewalks should now ease.

Instead, there was a mob inside, hunched over an enclosed cabinet displaying the new line of Apple watches.

I have been pretty dismissive of the promised high tech timepiece as never being able to move the needle on the company?s humongous earnings.

Now, I am not so sure.

I get the VIP treatment at Apple because I used to know Steve, and because I buy a ton of hardware there, all at a nice discount. More importantly, I get to beta test new products before they are released to the public, such as my current laptop (all solid state, and no hard drive).

The store manager spotted me and came over to give me the pitch on the iWatch.

The Apple Watch comes in three different models, two different sizes, and six different finishes, with a range of swappable bands and prices ranging from $349 all the way up to the pure gold version for $17,000.

Don?t think of these as standalone devices, although they do have limited functions on their own, like telling time, displaying calendars, a limited photo library, playing music, and monitoring your heart and calorie consumption.

It is really an extension of your iPhone via a Blue Tooth connection. That gives you complete access to your entire iTunes libraries.

There is no camera. So that knocks out Facetime. If you want to video that UFO landing on your front lawn, you?ll have to resort to your iPhone. It can view photos, but only those imported or sent as attachments to emails or texts.

Here?s the big one: it has Apple Pay. One swipe of your wrist and you can pay for anything. This turns Apple into a large financial institution on day one, without the encumbrance of a physical branch network.

I?m thinking, uh-oh, there goes PayPal (a wholly owned subsidiary of Ebay (EBAY).

There are a number of techno geeks currently tearing the watch apart to get to its internal guts, and here is the early take.

The watch has its own accelerometer, gyrometer and heart-rate monitor, but no onboard GPS.

It uses Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz Wi-Fi to connect to your phone or your home network. There's a built-in speaker and microphone, but no headphone jack. That lets you dictate emails and text messages, Dick Tracy style.

The watch comes with an 18-hour battery life, and 72 hours if you use it to tell time only. You can get an 80% recharge in 90 minutes (longer than my Tesla). It has 8 GB of storage, including 2 GB for music and 75 MB for photos.

The future of the growth of an iWatch ecosystem will develop entirely on the development of third party apps. Other Apple products can now purchase or get for free more than 1.2 million apps.

However, there are 3,000 watch apps already, which developers cleverly, but nervously designed around an online preproduction digital ?virtual? watch.

Much of the excitement about the watch among long-term strategists derives from its potential.

You can bet the company is putting together an in-house credit card to cut Visa, Master Card and American Express out of several hundred billion dollar?s a year worth of credit card transaction fees for the benefit of Apple Pay.

I don?t think I?ll be buying one anytime soon, unless Starbucks refuses to let me in without one (give it five years). In the meantime, I?ll stick with my vintage Rolex Cellini (vintage watch for a vintage guy?).

As for the stock, buy it now, with both hands, as much as you can, and then forget you own it.

Still My Kind of Watch

Google?s earnings were terrible. Therefore, the stock is rocketing.

The fact that the earnings were not as bad as they could have been seems to be the twisted logic behind this rally.

You would think I have a hole in my head buying a stock that just got slapped with a massive antitrust suit in Europe, which could potentially result in a record $6 billion fine, and suffers from plunging profits.

Clearly, Europe suffers from a ?Not invented here? syndrome.

However, it is safe to say that these negatives are now in the price. Anti trust suits take decades to resolve, and always end with an out of court settlement agreeable to all when they are of this size. Remember IBM and Microsoft?

Traffic at Google actually rose, but the company suffered a hit from the weak Euro, as did most other multinationals. That is largely behind us (see the Friday letter about the tag ends of the Euro collapse).

But margins are stabilizing, and the erosion seen in previous quarters now appears to be a thing of the past.

What you will hear next is about how much revenue from Google?s mobile ads search is exploding. Profits from YouTube are also building, and is no longer the drag it once was.

Knock out their revenues, and the cost per click realized at Google is actually rising. These are all good things.

Investors are so desperate to find a laggard quality stock in a toppy market with decent future growth prospects that they are willing to give my next door neighbor, the Internet search giant, the benefit of the doubt.

There has been such an influx of money into ?safe? dividend paying, bond proxy stocks that companies which sell toilet paper now trade at 25X earnings, while growing technology stocks are valued at a sub market 15X earnings.

In that looking glass world, you always buy the technology stocks.

It?s either this, or buy more Apple (AAPL), which announces earnings on Monday. But you are probably already up to the gills with Steve Jobs? creation, that is if you have been reading the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s research.

At the very least, (GOOG) shares have to play catch up with (AAPL), which is coming off its own torrid year.

This means that the shares have rock solid support at $520, and that the Google (GOOG) May, 2015 $520-$540 deep in-the-money vertical call spread makes all the sense in the world.

You can pay all the way up to $18.50 for this spread and it still makes sense, as the expiration is in a short 15 trading days.

If you can?t do the options, then buy the sock. It is headed north of $600 a share soon.

The earnings announced for Q1 so far have been miserable, pummeled by a weak Euro, terrible weather and the West Coast port strike. But rather than collapse, global equity markets have punched through to new highs.

It isn?t just the United States that is performing this magic trick. Most European indexes (HEDJ) have blasted through to new eight-year highs.

Even more impressive is the Nikkei average?s breakout to a new 15-year summit, making short work of key long-term Fibonacci levels that have been holding the Japanese stock index back for months.

That totally works for me, as I am keeping 10% of my model-trading portfolio in the Wisdom Tree Japan Hedged Equity ETF (DXJ), and another 10% short the Currency Shares Japanese Yen Trust ETF (FXY).

What gives?

The hard truth is that the American economy suffered a recession during January to March, and that recession is now over. Call it the mini recession that came and went so fast that you missed it if you blinked.

What happens next is that the weather improves and the men on strike go back to work. If the Euro does continue to fall, it will only be the last 10% of a 45%, seven-year move from $1.60 to $0.88. It is rather late in the game to sell short the Euro. In other words, it is almost over.

So, there is nothing left for stocks to do but discount a new economic recovery. In layman?s terms, that means ?Go up.?

For economic historians, such as myself, this was a most peculiar recession. For a start, no one knew it was happening. By the time they did, it was over. Interest rates never moved an iota. Unemployment fell. And stocks maintained their relentless push northward.

Man, this is my kind of recession!

So, what happens next?

Stocks go up more, but not by much. We haven?t had a clearing, capitulation type sell off since October. Since we never went down by more than 4% this year, that means the gains from here will be modest as well. I?m thinking that the S&P 500 (SPY) might reach $215 by June.

That?s why I took the bold move of buying the S&P 500 SPDR?s (SPY) May, 2015 $215-$218 in-the-money vertical bear put spread yesterday. As long as the index trades below $215 on the May 15 expiration day, in 15 trading days, I will get to keep the maximum potential profit or some 12.6% on the trade in only 3 weeks.

Not bad.

If you don?t believe me, then take a look at the price of Texas tea. Since it bottomed on March 17, the price of crude has rocketed by an awesome 37%, from $42.50 to $58, one of the sharpest moves in history.

This set energy stocks, and my favorite, solar shares, on fire, which played a major role in supporting the indexes at their lofty levels. At this point, the entire world is hoping to buy energy on the next dip and turn their holdings into energy portfolios.

Let me toy with your mind a little bit more. With another economic recovery on hand, the Federal Reserve is going to have to raise interest rates sooner or later (Hey Janet! Call me!).

However, just as this bull market is unlike any other, so may be the next interest rate cycle. When the headline unemployment rate hits 5% next year, the Fed will boost rates, but only by ?%. After that, we may see a second, and possibly a third ?% hike.

Then they will be done. Interest rates will peak at 1% and then a new recession, possibly only another ?mini? one, will prompt a rapid decent in interest rates down to zero. In other words, the next entire interest rate cycle may have Fed funds go from 0.25% to 1%, and then down to 0%.

Pshaw! You may say. But consider this: Deflation is still everywhere. There is no hint of wage pressure whatsoever. Commodity prices have just staged a modest rally, but are still a fraction of their old highs.

And as long as Janet Yellen heads the Federal Reserve, which is another 4-9 years at the very least, there will be no interest rate increases until we have proof of real inflation. That leaves us with only the above-mentioned token interest rate rises for the foreseeable future.

Let me throw one more idea out there for you to chew over.

Take a look at the chart below from my friends at Business Insider. Every time stocks traded at a 17X multiple since 1988, shares generated a positive return over the following 12 months.

That certainly makes stocks look like a ?BUY? to me!

Stocks at These Levels Requires No Magic Trick