Buy 5 Dividend Stocks With Leverage Over Apple

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Very few companies call the shots in negotiations with Apple (AAPL). The ones that do run in one space -- big media.

Recently, Tim Cook, CEO of the company Steve Jobs built, noted that he would double down on secrecy. Of course, an increasingly uncritical gaggle of AAPL bulls applauded the statement, complete with accompanying fist pumps and chest bumps.

While it's nice to turn your brain off once in a while, the best times generally do not come at critical stages in the life of an investment. That's where we are right now with AAPL. The stock will either hit the lofty price targets analyst cheerleaders set for it or not. I lean toward not.

Bulls are ignoring the importance of iTV vis-à-vis Apple's stock price. Plenty of questions surround the pending launch. And I am not sure Tim Cook has the answers, which might be a better explanation for his cloak of secrecy, rather than Apple tradition.

The questions surrounding iTV. And whether or not, Apple scrambles for answers in a world without Steve Jobs. It's the one thing AAPL bulls as well as company executives do not want to talk about. In fact, they generally blow it off by discounting the importance of iTV or spewing some talking point straight out of a corporate press release.

Of those questions, how Apple will handle content acquisition and partnerships, assuming this new device even requires such arrangements, presents as the most vexing. By most accounts, these talks are not going well, as noted in an article at Mashable.com.

The major content providers have absolutely zero incentive to cooperate with Apple on content deals. In fact, Apple barely ranks a step above Netflix (NFLX) in this regard.

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