AAPL shredded a 231.13 Hidden Pivot rally target with such ease on Wednesday that the stock is all but guaranteed to reach 240.45 (see inset) over the near term.  It gained $2.35 on the day, generating enough additional paper wealth to buy eleven million pairs of Gucci loafers. If you stacked them fifteen-high, they would cover Alaska and Texas to a depth of 18 inches. If you instead bought Evian water, it would fill 3,240 Olympic-size swimming pools. A thousand video-gamers couldn’t spend it all in an arcade if they played Mortal Kombat round-the-clock for 22 months.  As we know, however, most of the wealth will go not into Gucci shoes, but into the pockets of institutional investors who are paid princely sums to throw OPM at a relative handful of stocks. Nice work if you can get it.

AAPL is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, implying that it takes increasingly vast sums of OPM to levitate the stock. This has posed no problem, at least not so far. The Cupertino purveyor of overpriced smartphones has been buying back tens of billions of dollars worth of its own shares. In addition fresh quantities of OPM appear to be flowing into AAPL at a torrential pace, so eager are investors to get a piece of the surest of sure things. We’ll go with the flow ourselves — to 240.45, anyway  — but it will be tempting to short this out-of-control gas-bag with some tightly stopped put options when it gets there._______ UPDATE (Oct 7, 4:37 p.m.):  The stock plummeted to the green line Friday, generating a moderately appealing ‘mechanical’ buy signal. I say ‘moderately’ because the correction, assuming that’s what it is, has come from a higher starting point than we should prefer. Let’s see how it goes, but officially we’ve taken no action._______ UPDATE (Oct 9, 7:29 p.m.): The stock is on a ‘double-buy’ signal, having tripped a ‘counterintuitive’ trade at the green line shown in this chart in addition to the ‘mechanical’ signal noted above. HP levels associated with each can and should be used for profit-taking. Please let me know in the chat room if you hold a position, since I will establish a tracking position if two subscribers used my guidance to get long.