Apple

With respect to the potentially important top I've been projecting for the stock market, Apple's shares appear to be out-of-sync following yesterday's nearly 5-point decline.  However, the Industrial Average and the E-Mini S&Ps are still tracking Hidden Pivot rally targets very precisely and will achieve them on moves that exceed yesterday's highs by, respectively, 108 points and 16 points. Even if Apple fails to reach its target, shorts advised in the other vehicles remain viable.

With major, long-term targets not far above in several key vehicles that we monitor closely, we double-checked the Hidden Pivots not only for accuracy but for coincidence, since they could conceivably produce a very important top for the stock market within a week or less. Indeed, the S&Ps, Dow and bellwether Apple are all bound for ‘D’ rally targets that could all be hit around the same time. Meanwhile, although we looked for a real-time trade in the E-Mini S&P, the lesson here was that it is sometimes best to do nothing.

With Apple closing fast on a rally target identified here earlier, I've provided detailed instructions on how to get short at the prospective swing high, or to take profits if you've been on board for the move.

iPads flew off the shelves over the weekend, at least for a while, but most stores reportedly still had a few of the devices left after the initial buying panic subsided on Sunday. Although there’s been plenty of speculation that the device will be a paradigm-changer for users, the question of which paradigm it will change remained murky at press time. Just about any new device in the computer family is going to shift the game away from Microsoft in some small way, at least, since the Redmond-based software monolith hasn’t brought anything exciting to the marketplace since it introduced the Office suite in 1989.  Apple hasn’t exactly been standing still in the meantime, and the company looks like a good bet to surpass Microsoft in market capitalization sometime this year or early next.  Actually, there’s no reason why this couldn’t happen in mere days if investors were to suddenly grasp how Steve Jobs & Company has already eaten Microsoft’s lunch going out to 2015 and beyond. Remember when Microsoft was planning to dominate our living rooms with a “smart” home entertainment center that would have made going out on Saturday night unnecessary?  There were predictions that all of us would eventually pay the company a royalty for just about anything that made us feel good. Instead, they produced Windows 7 – a pretty decent operating system by most accounts, but not something you’d find at the top of the hedonist’s shopping list. Microsoft’s Last Chance Microsoft has been marking time for so long, accumulating cash it has no idea how to use, that it has forgotten how to innovate.  Our suggestion would be to team up with Sony, another company that has lost its way, to deliver the ultimate killer software that we all know is coming anyway.  We