Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 14

• Apple hits record high but leaves some investors in dust: Apple shares cruised to a record-high close Monday, helping catapult the S&P 500 stock index over the $20 trillion mark in what amounts to a victory for plain-vanilla mutual funds over a bevy of hedge fund managers who recently backed away from the iPhone maker. The largest component of the S&P 500 and a core holding on Wall Street, Apple's stock climbed 0.9 percent to end at $133.29, above its record high close of $133.00 hit on Feb. 23, 2015 and giving it a market value of about $699 billion. Its increase helped balloon the S&P 500's .SPX market capitalization on Monday beyond $20 trillion for the first time. While mutual funds have largely bet on Apple in recent months, some big names missed out on all or part of its recent acceleration. Hedge fund manager Dan Loeb's Third Point LLC cut its stake in Apple by 26 percent to 1.9 million shares in the fourth quarter, according to regulatory filings, while George Soros and Carl Icahn also shed their Apple shares last year.In contrast, the number of mutual funds reporting they became Apple shareholders in recent quarterly filings has jumped by 187 percent to 287, while the number of mutual funds liquidating their Apple holdings dropped by 26 percent to 151, according to Morningstar. Apple has climbed 50 percent from lows in the first half of last year and is up 15 percent so far in 2017. Monday's gain came after Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski raised her price target for Apple to $150. She said she is more confident that an upcoming 10th anniversary iPhone will feature augmented-reality technology, which could help boost demand in a saturated smartphone market. Many investors are betting that Apple will mark the iPhone's 10th anniversary with a dramatically improved model. They also believe that strong sales of the iPhone 6S two years ago have left a larger-than-normal base of customers ready to upgrade.

• Twitter plans to trim down its ads products: Twitter continues to bleed cash and its advertising business has begun shrinking, so it’s time for a change. Twitter will pare down three areas of its ad product, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch. Twitter foreshadowed the shift during last week’s lackluster earnings report that showed a year-over-year decline in Q4 ad revenue, from $641 million in 2015 to $638 million in 2016. Meanwhile it saw little growth in monthly active users (currently 319 million, up 4 percent year-on-year). That added up to a $167 million loss last quarter. Together these facts underscore a critical issue for the company: It has yet to find the right formula for products that attract both users and revenues. But Twitter is trying to course-correct, and its solution is two-fold: it’s redefined itself around a core mission — last week described as “the best and fastest place to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about,” and, TechCrunch has learned, it’s looking at ways of paring down its ad business to have more focus, too. Three areas that Twitter is reassessing include the company’s direct response business, aspects of the Promoted Tweets products and the legacy TellApart business. Twitter has not shuttered any of these yet, but from what we understand, it is now concentrating on what is driving more revenues. If there are products that are not getting significant buy-in from advertisers (say hundreds of millions in revenue), Twitter wants to stop supporting them.