Apple Computer

This stock was so revved up at the close on Friday that one could almost believe it capable of returning to the old highs. I seriously doubt it, although we shouldn't get too aggressively in the stock's way as it methodically disembowels any bears who survived Friday;s carnage. Remember, AAPL's institutional sponsors are the smartest, craftiest, richest scumbags in the investment world, and they instinctually work together as one when the goal is to replace themselves with new owners. For sure, Warren Buffett and his ilk are in for the long haul. But if they can create opportunities to lighten up at ridiculous prices, they will. From a technical standpoint, Friday's rabid short-squeeze must be respected because it began at a secondary pivot, p2=250.87. That is where corrective moves often end, although reversals occurring from p (in this case, 268.58) should be treated with even more respect. ______ UPDATE (Mar 16, 8:35 p.m.) The 233.16 target shown in the chart remains valid and can be used to bottom-fish, provided you know how to control the risk tightly. _______ UPDATE (Mar 17, 8:50 p.m.): Not sure what I found to like so much about the 233.16 target, since AAPL has bounced from within 21 cents of another  that comes from as juicy a pattern as I can now find. The stock has been struggling for three days to hold the low, but I won't offer any predictions at the moment concerning whether it will hold. Here's a graphic picture. _______ UPDATE (Mar 18, 9:21 p.m.): Buffett and DaBoyz beat back sellers for a third straight day, suggesting this could be the start of a short squeeze more murderous, even, than the $25 tsunami that occurred last Friday.

AAPL has traced out a pretty simple pattern that implies minimum slippage from here to at least p=269.86. Although the pattern is obvious enough to attract the attention of the hoi-polloi we always hope to be trading against, the midpoint pivot is probably sufficiently obscure to offer a decent place to attempt bottom-fishing.  The stock will be short-able in the meantime intraday, but I'll leave the details to the Trading Room, assuming there is sufficient interest. The gaps between HP levels are so big that we can hope to trade the stock, by turns, from either side of the market. Nudge me if you're keen to take a plunge in options when choice opportunities arise. ______ UPDATE (March 9, 8:54 p.m. EDT): Today's plunge shredded the 269.86 midpoint Hidden Pivot, making further slippage to 235.72 a good bet. Here's the chart. _______ UPDATE (Mar 10, 9:04): Just an inch more and AAPL will trip a signal to get short 'mechanically' at the green line. I've spotlighted the stock's ability to tell us exactly what's on Mr. Market's diabolical mind, and so we shall see. I am not recommending the trade, which would require a stop-loss at  304.01, but we'll track it anyway in order to gt a firm handle on AAPL's behavior. The 235.72 target flagged above is still viable and will remain so unless the stop-loss on the short is hit. _______ UPDATE (Mar 11, 9:50 p.m.): The stock failed by an inch to trigger a mechanical short by touching 286.93 on the last rally. That will not affect the odds of more slippage to 235.72, however, even though the stock appeared to resist a wholesale collapse today. We can assume AAPL shares are being deftly distributed by DaBoyz, who would be well aware of the company's vulnerability in

Don't take your eyes off this stock if you want to understand how short squeezes work. This one, involving as it does the shares of the most valuable company in the world, is guaranteed to be spectacular. It is a textbook case for several reasons: 1) the biggest institutional investors on the planet own AAPL up to their eyeballs; 2) they are determined to lighten their positions ahead of potential earnings pain from the coronavirus; and, 3) after hanging tough through one of the steepest selloffs in history, they are not about to bail out bears with ample supply until the latter have driven the stock well above $300 or even to new record highs. Notice that the chart shows a $326.25 rally target that would become an odds-on bet if AAPL blows past the $306 midpoint Hidden Pivot. If and when the stock achieves those heights, you will notice that nearly everyone -- investors, pundits, and news media -- will have forgotten about what was troubling Apple in the first place. Recall that the company announced a couple of weeks ago that supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic would take a heavy toll on earnings. This was no exaggeration, considering Apple's assembly operations are concentrated almost entirely in China. Investors reacted appropriately by marking down shares by 20% in the space of a week.  Now, powered by a short-covering panic, the smart money has recouped more than half of the loss and could conceivably get all of it back. What Warning? If AAPL gets within $10 to $15 of the record high $328 achieved on January 29, it will be as though the company's revenue warning never happened. Even better for big players seeking to lighten their load, once AAPL seems comfortable above $300, many institutional investors who

AAPL bounced a spectacular $22 off a low that occurred $2 from the 254 target we'd used to try and nail the bottom of the so-far mini-bear market. That wasn't quite close enough to get long with one of the trick-shot set-ups we use, although it may have helped timing an exit from any puts you held for the ride south. Looking just ahead, we can use the 281.37 target of the rABC pattern shown as a minimum upside objective, but the stock would need to push past 285.65 to generate a strong impulse leg on the hourly chart. The trick for us now will be to avoid underestimating the power of this short squeeze, which will feed on the tendency of fools to do exactly that. _______ UPDATE (Mar 2, 10:32 p.m. EST): The world's smartest money is up to its beady little eyeballs in Apple stock, so shorts don't have a prayer. It's going to be 'Take no prisoners!' all the way up, and the goal will be to jack the stock high enough so that it can attract a new crop of institutional suckers who will think they're getting a bargain on even mild weakness above $300.

AAPL's spectacular swan dive has created a very powerful impulse leg on the daily chart -- one that bulls are unlikely to recoup quickly via the usual, raucous short-squeeze. There will be vicious squeezes nonetheless, but the more violent they are, the more effectively we can use Hidden Pivot levels to get in and out of trades. This was a salient feature of the dot-com crash two decades ago, and I doubt it has fundamentally changed. Looking just ahead, you can use this chart to get a handle on the stock's behavior, however erratic. We'll pay particular attention to 'mechanical' set-ups -- not necessarily to trade them, but to give us an additional edge over other market forecasters. _______ UPDATE (Feb 25, 6:43 p.m. EST): After selling off steeply, the stock bounced from within an inch of the 285.53 midpoint Hidden Pivot support shown in the chart. I doubt the rally will get legs, but we'll have to wait and see. If it relapses and takes out the pivot, the 267.82 'D' target with which it is associated would be in play. _____ UPDATE (Feb 27, 8:47 p.m.): Here's how that 267.82 target looks on a chart. I like it even more now than I did two days ago. _______ UPDATE (Feb 28, 7:05 a.m.): AAPL has overshot the 267.82 target by a whopping $4 so far.  At first I though this might be because the company is more exposed than most to coronavirus, which is true. That explanation won't wash, however, since I've always maintained here that stocks drive the news rather than the other way around. When I redrew AAPL's bearish ABC pattern so that it follows the coordinates I used to nail the overnight lows in the Mini-Dow and the E-Mini S&Ps precisely, however, I come up

AAPL has been churning for a month, generating a series of stochastic peaks on the daily chart that could spell trouble over the near term. The picture would grow even more more menacing if the stock were to roll down from these levels, since the corresponding stochastic peak this would create would diverge from the two that preceded it. We'll wait to see how things plays out over the next day or two before we draw any conclusions, but it would appear that bullish fervor is weakening and that the stock is being deftly distributed by the Masters of the Universe. _______ UPDATE (Feb 19, 8:15 p.m. EST): Bad news from AAPL has produced a predictable response: a two-day short squeeze that has brought the stock to within inches of a new all-time high. This is funny and even entertaining, but also instructive as to Wall Street's mindset and the disease that has been driving the bull market for months. I haven't given up yet on the idea that price action since around mid-January has been massively distributive. We may find out within the next week or so, but in the meantime I'll recommend bidding 0.40 for a few Feb 28 305 puts just in case, good through Thursday. _______ UPDATE (Feb 20, 6:26 p.m.): The puts climbed to 1.30 today on unusual weakness in the stock. Alas, we were not aboard because the options had traded no lower than 0.49, missing our cautious bid by nine cents. Even so, I've advised subscribers who got short on their own initiative to hold onto at least a portion of their positions in case the downtrend gains momentum. Here's an updated chart that suggests AAPL would need to fall hard to fully correct overbought excesses that built up over the last two

I've gotten a couple of congratulatory emails from Trader Mike congratulating me for nailing THE top in Apple, but I'm not so sure myself. Whatever the case, he's had an opportunity to leg into a June 250-245 put spread 20 times for a $30 credit. That means the worst he can do is make $600 on the position even if the stock rallies to the moon, but as much as $10,000 if it tanks. He credits me for getting him aboard with perfect timing, but my timing was actually a tad imperfect, since the stock went against him -- and my target -- by a few points before it turned south with a vengeance. The fact that he still holds a position is attributable as much to his guts as to my more or less accurate forecast. Subscribers who followed Mike in could have done the same spread for as much as a $1.15 credit, since the long side of the position, the June 250 puts, traded as low as 1.87 after he was aboard. If any of you did the trade, please let me know in the chat room and I'll beef up my guidance. Regarding AAPL's next move, here's a chart that shows a plausible path down to as low as 299.54. over the next day or two. Trade it at your discretion. ______ UPDATE (Feb 3, 9:45 p.m. EST): The dirtballs tipped their (bullish) hand Monday when they took AAPL down to 302.22 on the opening bar even as the broad averages roared higher. This will have been the easiest money they've  made in a while, but it has left a trail of death and dismemberment on the hourly chart that may take a couple of days to smooth over.  Don't be surprised in the meantime if

AAPL shot higher on record revenues reported after the close, and although the move wasn't quite strong enough to be described as freakish, it did put an ambitious, 337.22 target in play. It could also set the stock up for a 'mechanical' buy if AAPL should pull back to the green line at 313.72 without first having exceeded the so-far high at 327.90. Buyers' failure to hit the target in the moments following the news may have been due to the strong rally that had already occurred during the regular session. AAPL was up around $9 at one point, pushed by buyers who evidently were confident not only about the impending good news, but in the stock's likely reaction to it. This is bound to have a bullish effect on some other corporate giants yet to report this week, including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Boeing. DaBoyz, it would appear, are fully in command once again, inured to any coronavirus news that falls short of catastrophic. _______ UPDATE (Jan 29, 9:23 p.m. EST): If bulls are still in charge, a 'mechanical' bid at 321.56, stop 316.34, should produce a winning trade that hits the 337.22 target shown in the chart. I am not recommending the trade because it is riskier than the mechanical buy at 313.72 noted above, but we can watch from the sidelines nonetheless for signs of weakness (or strength). _______ UPDATE (Jan 30, 3:16 p.m.): For the record. the 'risky' trade proffered above showed a theoretical profit of as much as $1100 on the opening bar. Looking ahead, although I am not in love with the stock at the moment -- not that I ever was -- it would trigger a 'mechanical' buy of larger degree at 313.54, stop 305.88 (see the original chart). The objective would be 336.47

I would caution bulls against breaking out the bubbly merely because this gas-bag finally exceeded my 319.92 target after ten days of trying. In the first place, I'd stipulated that AAPL must close above that Hidden Pivot resistance for two consecutive days before we regard the 336.35 target as an odds-on bet. For two, Friday's stall and $6 relapse began almost precisely at the 323.95 midpoint Hidden Pivot shown. That's the most likely place for a trend failure to occur, and so the yellow flag is out, tempering our expectations of a surefire move to 336.35.  The pattern can still be used to trade the stock either bullishly or bearishly, but please note that AAPL would NOT become a mechanical buy on a pullback to x=316.25 because the C-D rally died well short of our sweet spot for this type of trade. _______ UPDATE (Jan 27, 9:42 p.m.): I'm tracking 20 June 250 puts @ 3.05 for a subscriber who used my 319.92 target to get short. I've recommended shorting 20 June 245 puts against them for $3.55, but you can go as low as 3.35, where they topped on Monday, if you please.