AAPL Update and AAPL/QQQ P/L

*I've been trying to get this post out for well over an hour, hopefully some of it still makes sense,

As warned earlier, I was looking for some downward momentum to close AAPL and QQQ puts in to this morning, QQQ & AAPL March 20 Put Management and I'm sure I could have squeezed more juice out of them, in fact I may be dead wrong about even closing them, but we live on the right side of the chart and you make the best decisions you can with the information you have.

My main concern with both positions was time decay, I like to have a lot of time on options even if I'm almost positive I don't need it, this has made all the difference between a losing and winning position over the long haul for me and every time I violate that precept, I end up paying for it so why not stick with what works (for me any way, the key is always to find what works for you and hopefully our analysis gives you an edge in making that work better).

As for the positions and the P/L, as you know half of AAPL was taken off the table on March 5th at about a +10% gain pre-earnings, that half was added back yesterday.

As for today, here's the P/L for both,

AAPL came out to a +22% gain, an aded 10% just for waiting for that intraday downside momentum.

The Q's came out to a +48% gain, another +10% for waiting a bit longer for the intraday turn down as I always want to close puts in to a move lower rather than wait for them to turn sideways or start up as both are doing this very moment.

Additionally I was watching volume pretty closely, increased volume was a cue as to when I'd want to pack it in on an intraday tactical basis, but this same concept holds for macro trends , say a daily chart or even a 5-day chart.

Without even using 3C, I knew the probabilities of a turn to the downside were higher as we have a pretty significant move this morning and volatile markets are volatile even intraday, but before any upside volatility would be likely to begin, a wider "W" base intraday would be the most probable outcome, therefore I just set alerts below the area when I decided I'd be wrapping up the positions at "A" and then watched for volume and/or fading price momentum which could also be done with a Rate of Change indicator applied to price on an intraday setting (if you can't apply ROC directly to price, apply it to an invisible 1-bar moving average of price which is exactly the same, 1 bar has no averaging, but allows you to attach ROC as a child indicator).

Did I get the best exit, no and I knew that there was always going to be a strong chance that I wouldn't.

However this is why I wanted to get out of the March 20th which has the F_E_D ahead which could be a couple of days of knee jerk, even if it resolves lower with a crash, that essentially wipes out the options on time decay from a couple of days of the market being flat ahead of the meeting and a possible knee jerk so I want to re-establish the positions, but I need more time on the expiration.

AAPL...

I've made the argument and even shown the evidence that AAPL is turning from a former MSFT growth monster to a MSFT range-ish blue-chip, AAPL is making that same transition and if you look back at MSFT, they had an even bigger momentum story than AAPL, but once they declared a dividend, everything changed and they became a blue chip rather than a momentum monkey.

I was going to talk a little about AAPL's future and what they are doing which I don't approve of, I think they rightfully belong on the DOW with the other former growth stories gone flat and turned dividend income stocks. I decided it serves no purpose for me to go on a rant, but I'll just say from a consumer's perspective, the mystique and the "cool" factor of AAPL is long gone (the days when being an AAPL owner of a mac made you a strange agent). AAPL's product line went from Revolutionary to evolutionary and they are playing catch-up on just about every product they make. I have used Macs for about 10 years and love them, but I'm having a much harder time justifying paying a thousand dollar premium for a machine that for all intents and purposes, doesn't offer what some of the PC's do now, the only thing that I really like is the OS and I've heard the new OS is not so great, sort of like MSFT's newer APP based OS, so is it really worth $1000 more when the main thing I'm interested in is Flash hard-drives I can get on virtually any brand? I'm not sure it's worth it.

As for the I-phone, I had been with them since the first one, but 2 years ago I switched to the Galaxy. Is the Galaxy as intuitive and clean as the I-Phone? No, but it allows me to do a lot more without Apple controlling every aspect of it, if I buy music I own it and can take it wherever I want and do whatever I want with it. Besides, AAPL was way behind the curve and is now just catching up to what Galaxy was a year ago, when the new Galaxy comes out (the 5 is kind of a flop IMO), it's going to put AAPL behind the curve again with just the "Apple" branding, but again, as they have tried to make products like the I-Phone C's, a phone for everyone and now this insanely expensive watch that I can get a lot cheaper in other brands without an AAPL, do I really want to pay for the branding? Not after the Turlington event, wow, AAPL products use to stand on their own and she'd just have been a distraction, what happened? They lost Steve Jobs is what happened IMO. OK, sorry about that.

 As for the trend that broke out just a bit before the market's Feb. cycle, the 1-day Trend Channel has held it since January, it just broke last week at the red arrow, that means the Trend Channel is telling us that something in AAPL's price ROC has changed character to the tune of 2 standard deviations of the typical 10-day rolling trend and that's a change in character.

On this 15 min chart, this pierce of support on that volume looks like a good place to accumulate a small position and bounce AAPL, that means that looks like a good opportunity for me to establish a new put position in to a small bounce on price strength and a put discount a  the additional time/expiration that I would like.

 Yesterday I showed the intraday AAPL chart 1 min and said, what you see is what you get, there were no divergence that suggested anything other than what was happening with price was setting up for a surprise, but today that's a little different with this intraday positive and since we started the day with a deep discount on the averages and AAPL, it's likely that we get at least an intraday bounce which may be my chance to re-establish the new position.

AAPL 2 min positive today...

The 5 min negative in AAPL looks about right considering the proceeding trend following. I'd like to see a move to the upside just to re-establish those puts.

AAPL is not worth it to me for the amount of assets that need to be committed for a core short, but it is worthwhile as a trading position with some leverage, meaning options, thus I'd prefer other assets that have a better risk/reward ratio for core trend positions and just use leverage to trade around AAPL and I'll show you why in a moment.

 AAPL 15 min, note the base area or accumulation area in white and the relative negative divegrence that is starting to lead. This tells me AAPL is not among my first choice of "MATURE" distribution assets, that it's likely to have more chop than trend in the coming weeks/months, thus I'd rather trade that volatility short term using leverage and save the trend positions for assets that are further along the process.

 AAPL 30 min shows the same thing with an accumulation area and a head fake move below support at the yellow arrow just before the transition to stage 2. Again, we have a nice relative divegrence, but not a leading one whereas many other assets are deeper in to their tops than AAPL.

The 4 hour AAPL chart tells me it's very likely AAPL is topping here, but looking at price, it would seem reasonable that we maya be at the top of a head in a H&S price pattern or some other price pattern's top, which means more volatility as the right side of the top forms, that's not ideal as a trending core position, but it is ideal as a shorter term trading position with leverage, thus the puts.

I hope anyone who took the AAPL or QQQ puts did as well if not better! There's just too much risk for me right now with a March 20th expiration, this is all about simply fixing that expiration problem.