AAPL Watch

News that Apple Inc. has become the world's biggest tech company is, of course, much less than it seems.

	trend	adx	psar	pps	macd	macd trend	sto	sto trend
AAPL $250.94

At 11:30 a.m. Eastern

AAPL's market cap exceeded Microsoft's (MSFT) as MSFT slid 7.7% intra-day. AAPL was also down, but by less.

So, one day reversing that pattern, and the relative rank of the two companies reverses. It's not a horse race. They're separate companies, separate stocks, with varying technicals, fundamentals, markets and decision-making styles.

Jim Cramer, the "Buy!Buy!Buy!Sell!Sell!Sell!" guy on CNBC, has AAPL on his buy list. I admire Cramer for his smarts in analyzing the fundamentals of company's business. However, he's a long-term guy, I'm not. He's a fundamentalist. I'm a technician.

So, what to think of AAPL's technicals?

On the bull side,

Persons' Proprietary Signal is showing bull phase this morning, after a seven-day walk on the bear side, during a period in which the parabolic sar maintained a stately bullish posture.

The pps isn't to be trusted on AAPL these day, having flipped phases six times since April 28.

The macd, although in bear territory, is rising toward the zero line, and the stochastic is flying through the neutral zone up toward overbought territory. It's bullish when the signal moves to overbought, and a bear signal when it leaves that range (above the 80-line).

On the bear side,

The most recent near-term-day rise has been accompanied by falling volume.

The trend is -- well, trendless. The 14-day exponential moving average is moving sideways.

The macd 9-day moving average is on the verge of crossing below the zero-line, and that is a large bear signal. The macd moving average is a very slow oscillator, and when it gives a signal, it pays to listen.

AAPL hit a swing high of $272.46 on April 26, and since then has traded more or less sideways with a slight downward bias. It has set a lower high and a lower low since that date, and that by the book is a downtrend.

Longer-term, AAPL has had a huge run-up, and the April 26 price is a higher high in the climb.

AAPL would need to break below $185.57 (the Nov. 2, 2009 correction low) before the bullish big picture would be in doubt.

Reversal Levels

• $272.46, +8.6%
• $270.57, +7.8%
• $265.00, +5.6%
• $250.94 <== You are here





• $231.35, -7.8%





• $225.21, -10.3%

Note that I'm ignoring the "flash crash" low set on May 6. I don't consider that to be a valid intra-day low for any stock.

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Beat the Market: Win with Proven Stock Selection and Market Timing Tools Gerald Appel, the inventor of the MACD tech analysis tool, gives hard-earned wisdom on stock picking and the timing of tardes. A masterwork by a market master.

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Abbreviations:

• psar - Parabolic Stop and Reverse
• adx - Average Directional Index
• pps - Person's Proprietary Signal
• ma20 - 20-day moving average
• macd - Moving Average Convergence-Divergence
• sto - Fast Stochastic

About the glance: The colors indicate the state of each signal.

• trend: Determined by the 5-day moving average, green for up, red for down, yellow for sideways
• adx: orange for above 30-up, blue for 20-down, purple for in the middle. Red is most prone to whipsaws
• psar, pps, macd: green for bull mode, red for bear
• sto: green for overbought, red for oversold, yellow for the neutral zone.

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