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- Is There Any Hope For Apple?
This is the weekly version of The Prime Wave. The weekly is free for all subscribers, daily updates of the Swingex Index are reserved for paid subscribers only.
THE BIG IDEA
You may remember Apple from such products as the Macintosh computer, the iPod, and the Apple Pippin. It is still one of the most valuable companies on the planet with a total market cap around $3 trillion, give or take a few billion.
The stock has not been a winner lately, so today we will look at a few charts and try to guess the future for $AAPL.
We will start with a weekly chart going back a year. The main feature of this chart is the triangle that has formed in recent months. It is ok to apply some artistic license and ignore the darkest hours of the tariff tantrum in early April.
The typical result of this kind of triangle is for the stock to continue going in whatever direction it was already going. In this case: lower.
Now we can zoom in a bit with a daily chart for the last 3 months and include the daily trading volume. There is a lot of distribution of shares going on. You can see a distinct pattern in recent days for volume to be higher on down days than on up days. You could say this is something that has been in progress going back to the start of May. Another bearish sign.
Finally, let’s compare the relative performance of AAPL with the S&P 500 and also the Magnificent 7 stocks, which includes AAPL.
For much of the past year, AAPL has looked perfectly ok, even outperforming the S&P 500 for long stretches. That all changed on April 2nd. While many of its peers have rebounded, shares of Apple are still in a drunken daze, staggering back and forth but making no progress.
Would a change in the proposed U.S. tariff policy announced on April 2nd help AAPL? Maybe. Unless or until that happens, we will stick with what the charts are telling us and stay away from AAPL.
SEEN ON THE INTERNETS
Important - at the time - events in the world have an undeserved reputation for derailing the stock market.
We saw this post from Ryan Detrick, CMT where he looks at the stock market’s performance after previous big geopolitical or financial events. His table is copied below.
Our take is that such events usually matter little to what happens in the stock market. Maybe they used to matter a little. But in this century, we see only one “event” that mattered and that was primarily a financial issue and not a strictly political one.
There are alot of problems with lists like this one: First of all, the list itself is subjective. Besides that, we don’t know what else happened during the following months that could have affected the stock market. Was it really the killing of an Iranian general in early 2020 that caused the market to crash?
But the biggest chart crime, in our eyes, is the double counting of events that happened close together. Go back and look at the events in October 1956 and October 1973. In both cases, it was really the same bad performance counted two times.
NUMBERS ONLY
98.14 | The U.S. dollar index (DXY) hit its lowest level in three years last week.
|
5.1% | Consumers’ expectations of inflation for the coming 12 months fell to only 5.1%. Expectations had been over 6% the previous two months. |
36 | The equal-weighted version of the S&P 500 was above its 20-day average for 36 days, before falling below it on Friday. |
SWINGEX INDEX
Swingy says: We might still go lower from here, especially if someone shoots a rocket into the wrong tent. But there are some patches of blue sky on the horizon. | As of market close on 13 June 2025+ 3 |  |
See some historical examples of the Swingex Index in action here.
REWIND
Along with the daily value of the Swingex Index, we sometimes highlight stocks that could do well over the next 3 days to 3 weeks. This is a look back to 2-3 weeks ago to see how they have played out.
It was hard to find long ideas, but we had one we liked and mentioned it the morning of May 29th.
$GE ( ▲ 1.4% ) - GE, yes that GE. General Electric. The day before it made yet another new high, and on active volume. It opened on the 29th at $244 and climbed to a closing high of $255 last week but has since fallen back below the entry price. Good for you if you got out in time.