Over the past six months, Wall Street has gone from thinking that Apple can do no wrong to thinking that there's no way Apple will ever again do anything right.  And, that said, Tim Cook's role as CEO has been brought into question.

As a result, the stock has collapsed from a high of $702 to a recent low of $390 last week.

And Wall Street is now bracing for what most people expect will be a terrible quarterly earnings report and outlook on Tuesday.

Apple's results in the December quarter disappointed many analysts, and the company's outlook for the first quarter was also meh. But now, after a steady flow of news reports suggesting that first-quarter sales have not gone well, as well as Apple's failure to release any new products so far this year, many on Wall Street think that Apple will miss even its low guidance for the quarter. Worse, many expect that Apple will provide an outlook for the June quarter that is far below what Wall Street is currently expecting.

In other words,

When faced with a problem or complicated situation it’s not uncommon for a person to ask friends for advice. But would you allow friends to make decisions about how to live your life? In 2008 Mike Merrill decided to split himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 per share. Shareholders would get voting privileges and decide what Merrill would do on a daily basis and on a grander scale, no questions asked.

Merrill started out by selling 929 shares to twelve of his friends. He paid $500 to a web developer to create a site with an online trading and voting platform. The share price operates in a free market manner- if shareholders don't like what Merrill is doing, they can simply sell shares and drive the price down. Within five years, Mike sold over 3,700 shares of himself and his stock price, which is calculated in real time, hit a high of $20.

Joshua Davis followed Merrill for over a year for an article featured in the April issue of Wired Magazine.