AAPL Riddle Solved

Is This what AAPL has been up to?

Way back on February 6th, one of the first posts to address something that was going on in AAPL that was bizarre was addressed in, What is AAPL Really Up to?

AAPL gave a "Buy" signal on our DeMark-ish custom indicator..

We see the sell signal at AAPL's top and a buy on this 2-day chart that led to a bounce and finally this buy on February 6th. AAPL was trading at $457 back then so if you were a long term investor and took that signal, you'd be in the green today as AAPL is around $545 mark.

The Daily 3C chart was even giving a positive divergence signal

"The point is, now there's a relative positive divergence so it seems something is going on here."

Furthermore...

"...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?...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."

Yes, I remember this period well, this wasn't the typical, "I think there's a trade developing here", this was something clearly out of the ordinary and we were seeing signs of it at least as early as early February.

In the daily wrap of February 7th I said...

"However the biggest early morning and end of day news may be AAPL which I recently looked at, decided something is going on there, but not having a solid grip on what, what timing, what kind of move, decided to wait for the charts to provide more of an edge than just, “Something is going on”."

If I did a search and sorted it by date and worked from February forward, I could probably produce something along the lines of somewhere near 50 posts just about the odd behavior in AAPL, that AAPL was up to something, but it was very difficult to tell if we were going to see a longer base that could support a bigger move or not and just what in fact this was all about.

In my view, although AAPL lost -45%, it had not seen that capitulation, crazy low wipeout, so I didn't think AAPL had hit an area of fair value where it could build again because before we get to those areas the market must first swing ridiculously lower than any common sense would dictate.

The only thing that made "some " sense to me was a counter trend rally because AAPL was in a bear trend and a rally in this area is pretty normal.

However even that didn't make a lot of sense and I've talked about it recently because the market and AAPL are typically pretty tight and I couldn't see the market going one way and AAPL going the other, but with the size of the accumulation, it seemed like AAPL had to be up to something and this has been an ongoing mystery as to "What AAPL is really up to".

Considering AAPL is the largest valued stock by market cap, when Carl Icahn "TWEETED the following today...

When ICAHN says he has a LARGE position in the largest Cap stock out there, you know its big. It would be absolutely no surprise to see that Icahn was buying in February, in fact considering the facts we have now, it wouldn't surprise me if he was buying before February as hedge funds were rushing out the door at significant losses.

I guess now we know what this was all about, like I say, 3C will often show us things that we don't understand and often by the time we do, the money has been made.

The two largest 3C accumulation signals.

AAPL 4 hour.

I'm not knocking Icahn's smarts or talents, just saying, he doesn't let anyone push him around, when Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn had a screaming match on CNBC and Ackman had made it very clear he was short Herbalife, Icahn bought and otherwise locked up so many shares of Herbalife that I'm pretty sure Ackman still hasn't found the supply to cover.

Just saying... I wonder if an AAPL store manager ticked him off and he said, "Do you know who I am? I'll buy this company and fire you!"

Hey, he can do it and make it work.