Apple Shares Up In Pre-Market Trading On Morgan Stanley Note

Morgan Stanley put out a note early this morning that said that per their iPhone tracker, demand for the iPhone for the March quarter are tracking well ahead of current Street consensus.

The analyst at Morgan Stanley, Katy Huberty, says that their tracker shows demand for 56.5 million units in the March quarter versus Street consensus of 50 million units.

With a lot of notes from analysts that cover Apple still talking about negative to neutral channel/supplier/demand/supply and demand/Asia team checks, Morgan Stanley seems to be the first to have found demand tracking ahead of estimates for this current quarter.

In addition, UBS has a note out as well that talks about a positive $0.25 per share (at minimum) impact on earnings if Apple does unveil a new 4 inch iPhone on March 21 at the Apple event in Cupertino.

The analyst at UBS said that he believes that a new phone could lead the 40% of users that still use 4 inch phones to upgrade and those upgrades could add 12 million incremental units sold this year alone.

Apple shares are currently up slightly over 1% despite our futures being down around 0.5% across the board.

Look for stocks up and down the Apple food chain to move nicely higher today as well, despite the global gloom and doom as we await our Federal Reserve decision set for tomorrow afternoon.

(Long aapl, calls)