I’ve devoted much of today’s commentary to Apple’s awful performance of late. If the stock has in fact made an important top, the broad averages will not get very far, even if they have rallied in recent days without AAPL’s leadership. Still, when we look at the monthly chart (see inset), it leaves plenty of room to infer that the stock’s weakness is merely corrective. Most recently, AAPL failed yesterday to refresh the bullish impulsiveness of the lesser charts. But the end-of-day downswing would need to breach 664.75 this morning — or still worse, 663.22 — to hint of more trouble next week. UPDATE (8:30 p.m. EDT): Apple swooned to 623.55 before recovering with a $17 bounce. It is prospectively bullish for the near term that the low of the move did not quite reach our target, but buyers will need to muster a further, unpaused push to at least 660.41 to generate the bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart that we require to reverse an intermediate-term trend. This is of crucial concern, since, as AAPL goes, so goes he stock market.
