As always, there’s no clear answer. Today was a quiet trading day at well under <10M shares traded. AAPL underperformed the NASDAQ as a whole. But it also put in a quietly constructive day, reclaiming 540 (a level with some recent relevance) with a dollar and change to spare.
The closer we get to earnings, the trickier and less instructive technical reads could be. That said, any potential clues from the charts today?
Let’s begin with the daily chart:
– Remains net constructive to my amateur eyes, though the bearish read is that AAPL has still failed to recoup the majority of its losses from the breakout failure at 549 from last Wednesday. There’s something of a bear flag forming, maybe.
– MACD-h and oscillators still positive on this timeframe.
– As far as “back to basics” trendlines, AAPL has continued to hold the light green trendline, though it my opinion AAPL should also continue to outpace the ascending purple trendline. That inverted head and shoulders-ish reversal pattern doesn’t seem out of the question – yet.
The hourly chart is where things get more interesting.
Hourly chart:
– MACD-h and oscillators are revving up on this quiet trading day.
– Check out the highly compressed Bollinger Bands – around 3.5 points in width. I’m not sure that’s happened at any point in 2014, and it seems unusually low for any point in recent memory.
– AAPL is having a “textbook” positive resolution from a micro inflection point – but will there be more follow-through, or will the momentum cut out like it did last Wednesday?
In my non-expert opinion, AAPL still has to prove itself to the market, and while the price action has been net constructive (failure to reach the 550s on the latest breakout aside), we’re once again at a point where AAPL is quite reasonably expected to “deliver” on its bullish promise. The heat and pressure readings on the hourly-timeframe teakettle seemed to point to a boil by the end of the day – but will it actually happen?
We’ll see how things go tomorrow.
The AAPL Tree 