A long time ago I was warning about AAPL while it was still the darling stock that just did not have a normal investing crowd, they were Apple groupies, how dare anyone say anything about AAPL because, "For sure, this time it's different". I think the question of the loss of Steve Jobs has been answered and as far as the "It's different this time", just take a look at a 10-15 year chart of MSFT and you'll know it's never different.
I'm not going to go down the road of all the mistakes AAPL made, but I'll touch on a few. I'll also say that the hedge fund hotel that was and still is AAPL, still has more guests that would like to check out and do it without taking a large loss.
I really can't see the launch of a cheaper IPhone as beneficial to AAPL,
"An IPhone for Everyone!", that crushes the appeal of AAPL, it was a clique, it was exclusive and edgy and that's because it was above the crowd's understanding early on and price point.
AAPL T.V.? Content providers don't seem to want to give AAPL the exclusive rights they demand, to basically do to movies what I-Tunes did to music, so I'm not sure I'd count on that.
The dividend is the death knell, it was for MSFT and not soon after AAPL declared one, it didn't help AAPL.
Finally the biggest faux-pas in my view was allowing the IP5 to hit the market. The IP5 was behind Samsung before it was even introduced, it's a nice phone, but it's kind of like MSFT's "Vista moment".
The launch of the IP5 was the first time I watched an AAPL product unveiling (as good as they are at selling the presentation, something BlackBerry could learn from) and thought to myself as well as posted here immediately after, "This is not revolutionary, it's evolutionary" and that was a first for AAPL and not a good one.
In any case, like Cramer says, "If you are down and desperate, you need to create a fiction to create a new truth" and if you are locked in Hotel AAPL with several million shares or tens of millions, you need a little help, the easiest thing to sell right now, "The AAPL sell-off is overdone". Cramer can call Steve Lies-man and start selling the "AAPL has so much cash, the price should be "X" amount higher based on that alone and they have XYZ in the pipeline from what I've heard from my sources" (wink, wink).
For a while it seemed like AAPL was setting up a long trade (this was a while back) and we needed some more confirmation, then we got caught up in that big descending triangle. Yesterday AAPL was one of the stocks showing early afternoon 3C strength and late afternoon deterioration, there are 3C charts that suggest something is going on, they just haven't met in the middle yet, so I'm inclined to sit back until I understand clearly what my edge is, but we want to know where we are so we know where we are going as AAPL moves.
Charts...
After the decline from September, which moved up +2.8% total after the F_O_M_C announced QE3, remember all the 3C negative signals at that point and I remember several emails saying, "Don't fight the F_E_D", it seems clear that QE3 was discounted long before it was announced, thus the negative signals on 9/13/2012.
This triangle is a bearish consolidation/continuation that saw an initial head fake breakout to the upside followed by a break to the downside creating a "Crazy Ivan" shakeout and 1 more move above resistance before the drop. Note the range now, what are ranges good for? Hint, 2 things, I starts with "A" and has a the following letters "ucmucaliotn" and the second has to do with something you'll see below that just happened this morning just above the range.
The long term Trend Channel has a ways to go to change the Primary trend or at least intermediate, but on a 5-day chart note the last 2 candlesticks are hammers as in, "Hammering out a bottom".
On a more sun-intermediate trend basis, here's the Trend Channel (3-days) which is not so unreasonable.
As far as my DeMark inspired indicator (Can someone please send me some ideas for a name for this indicator? Please?), we have a large sell signal, remember I told you the bigger they are, the more meaningful the move, then a buy signal and its move is meaningful according to the signal's size and a new signal that is already a bit bigger than the last, but it hasn't finished yet.
The Daily 3C chart shows the distribution of early 2012, I don't recall, but I think we might have played this as a quick short, then the September move down which I made a mistake of getting too "Lost in the lines", trying to get the best entry possible when the fact was AAPL was unpredictable as there were too many hedge funds who were all willing to say, "Every man for themselves" and "He who sells first, sells best".
The point is, now there's a relative positive divergence so it seems something is going on here.
The long term 2 hour chart with leading negative distribution at the Sept. top and not any real signals since until now, much like the daily chart above.
The 10 min chart has more detail although not as clean of a trend, there are several signals, the most recent is in the same area with the relative positives I talked about as the first to usually show up followed by a stronger leading positive (all in last night's post). So there's enough information to tell me something is going on, but is this something that's going to move soon or base for a while to support a stronger/longer move?
It's the charts from 1-15 minute that give us the timing and here's where there are some blank spots so far, yesterday the intraday 1 min was leading positive (remember I said the early afternoon positive divergences had me a bit perplexed, but the late afternoon negatives washed that away a bit). This morning look at the move and look at the negative divergence in to the move, now think about the 2 reasons I said ranges form, 1 was accumulation the second is to create movement, supply, demand and it's all based on obvious support and resistance. As price moved up there was distribution on an intraday basis.
The 3 min chart shows yesterday's strength and then weakness and today's distribution in to higher prices, which are....
just above the range this morning, want proof?
There it is, check the volume increase as traders perceive the move above the range as a breakout, but there was distribution in to that move so smart money wanted to do something with this move, maybe trap enough longs to send prices lower where they can be accumulated as the longs sell as their loss grows bigger, that creates supply at cheaper levels that can be accumulated.
Like I said, I don't have the exact game figured out yet, but the range is important and what happens above and below are important.
Keep AAPL on your radar, even if you have no interest in trading it, it's a market bellwether.
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