Got a major sell signal for AAPL today ... from my mom

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If it was just a little more predictable, we should all be getting rich, not that I'm doing really badly.

Short aapl again at 621...sooner or later this is going to work.
 
If it was just a little more predictable, we should all be getting rich, not that I'm doing really badly.

Short aapl again at 621...sooner or later this is going to work.

Good luck!

I was short the Nasdaq bubble in the late 90's. Lost quite a few bucks, got most of it back in April/May of 2000, then gave up shorting stocks forever. In fact, I won't go long stocks either. I figure it's too crazy and the insiders all know when things are going to happen and I'm not an insider.

Maybe one day many years from now I'll deem it safe enough to dip my toe back in the water but I think we're a long way from that.
 
If it was "safe" there wouldn't be any money in it. Any reward is associated with some risk. It's more equitably distributed risk/reward in other places to be sure. But even the guys rigging the game take some risks that they'll get caught and actually punished, or their rigging just won't work this time.

I don't make money on every trade. Some days it seems like a dartboard would actually choose better than I. But due to some interesting money management rules, I can actually open trades almost at random, and still make money by controlling how I scale in and out, and when to close it. The net result is a fairly large number of small losers, and a few big winners. If you do it right, the sum of the latter exceeds the former nicely. But you gotta play or you can't win, and right now my other options for making money are pretty limited, so it's what I do.

I may wind up closing this on in the red, like last time. But if it starts to go my way in any big fashion, I'll add a lot more to the trade. It's just an understood quirk of my own psychology that I pay much better attention when I have skin in the game - even if it's a puny amount.

And sometimes it's just pure luck, but the point is - if you let the winners run and cut losses, equal amounts of good and bad luck mean you make money. Like yesterday, I buy some FCX, just because it's cheap now, and its been good in the past. Today, CME drops silver and copper margins, and I make almost 6% in one day - now the hard part of this is "when do I sell", as that's an outsize one day gain, and too good to be true often turns out that way.
 
I am, but not enough to go dance in the street about - not much guts, not much glory.

Decent one day gain, though, and heeeerrrreees the weekend.

Short aapl
long-long agnc
long-long gold
long fcx (still green)
 
Yeeee-haaaaaa. AAPL down over a percent in one 10 min bar just now. Reminds one of some of the stranger moves in PM's we discuss here. Not even sure if I should scale in more or wait for a bounce here - seems every too-big-too-fast move in anything in any direction has a bit of reversion just after.

Edit: charting software fail!
AAPLShort.png
 
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Yeah, they are finding the exit a little crowded. This isn't one where retail jumps in with round lot trades too often (too rich for most blood) - who's going to buy it when they want out?

We did get our little bounce, "hey, aapl is on sale, grab it" but I note the volume on that is pretty low, and my level 2 stuff is just showing nearly random bids and asks, and some real big lots are changing hands (1000's). Looks like a scatter plot of a random number generator right now.
 
Well done! I see that the DJIA is up over 100 and the Nasdaq is done over 20. I've never seeen anything like that before and I figure a lot of that can be attributed to AAPL.
 
Or not - doubling down yesterday meant I watched a big green number turn into a small red one today - had I not, I'd still be green on this trade. Hanging tough for now, though.
 
Screenshot-26.jpg

Well, back in the green on this one. This is actually the most "normal" L II plot I've seen in days. At the left, note aapl catching a big bid in an attempt to stop the bleeding. It didn't hold.

Normally what I see on almost every stock is a few horizontal bars of bid and ask way above and below the current trades. Optimists of some kind, or just the algos. This looks as though (and has for a few days) like someone just turned the robots off - perhaps afraid they'd get clobbered in the crowded exits. Interesting. Does anyone know how to get this kind of data from nanex to see if we have the little super-short term wiggles thego make? I only have one second resolution here.
 
I think I'm going to go ahead and close this trade today, at a mere ~4% gain. Not too bad in about that many days - a percent a day makes dougie rich. Could have executed a lot better than doubling down at the worst possible time and so on, and might re-open it later (or do grpn or nok or some other tech losing the shiny).

What I'm seeing is huge bids suddenly appearing - someone is trying to stop the fall, and they have *real* money - single orders of 50k shares are popping up. Dunno if it's the fed, but at that level, it might not matter, and I won't fight that one.

In fact, I heard the other day about some major AAPL investor getting out just because the mo-mos had come in so heavy - he saw the writing on the wall. Seems like one or more of them have a friend somewhere, but I'll take my paltry winnings and do something better with them now.

The stuff I'm seeing on level II is just bizarre here...this trickly retail or big orders all broken up, then something truly huge - obvious attempt at manipulation, on both bids and asks - so big the retail stuff order size is just one pixel on an autoscaling plot.

You can play with elephants so much and not get stepped on, but after awhile it's tiring to stay out from under their feet. Next time we break below 577, I'm outa here, or at the end of day either way.
 
DC,
Look at the action on the DOW today alone. It is absolutely crazy. over 100mm shares handled by 0:30 or so this morning, when we usually see a handle of no more than a third of that by that time. BAC and GRPN getting slaughtered today. BAC might give back that eight handle on Monday or Tuesday.
 
This might be appropriate?
[ame]http://youtu.be/fFGZufk4HFs[/ame]

And you know, I didn't put a short on grpn because it was already down and looking like the ride might be almost over (the fun part, anyway).

I heard a bunch of people that I respect today, bulls and bears both, saying - heck, I'm out over this weekend. Too much up in the air to risk it.
 
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Well, GRPN is now down 5% when you add in the additional drop in after-hours, and BAC is down 5% as well. I think GRPN will fall through the floor on Monday, since it is now at $11.12 and dropping like a rock. After it loses it's 11 handle and falls through 10, I expect an even faster drop as institutions and funds with stops watch them get taken out, triggering automatic bail outs of big quantities of stock. I also think BAC will fall all the way back to five or six, where this time, I will be a buyer of around two thousand shares. "they" will never let BAC fail before the election......never. Neither side wants the blood of a TBTF on their hands, so anything and everything will be done behind the scenes to keep it afloat. In that case, I may as well peel of twenty or more grand for myself, since there is no built in "trickle down" from the bankster bailouts, I have to do it the old fashioned way........by front-running them.

That said, I am a world class pussy when buying paper promises for anything, because unlike the good old days, when you received an actual stock certificate, today you get jack, and your "shares" can and sometimes do, disappear with the pressing of the wrong key, never to be seen again. BAC however, may prove to be just too juicy to pass up. In fact, if she retakes the five handle give or take fifty cents in either direction, I am jumping in with some mad money.
 
Bumping this thread. When I started this thread AAPL was trading above $600, now it's trading at $518. I didn't have the balls to go short, though :paperbag:
 
FWIW, Reggie Middleton is still down on AAPL (from what I can tell of his twitter feed).
 
It looks like crabAPPL is looking for the big four hundred handle here. This is massive selling for a pretty long time. As far as i can see, APPL is still sitting on a ginormous pile of cash and their products are still flying off of the shelves, so what gives here? Is this just a bunch of rich geezers trying to not have to pay an extra 5% on their vig because of the rise in capital gains in January?
 
It looks like crabAPPL is looking for the big four hundred handle here. This is massive selling for a pretty long time. As far as i can see, APPL is still sitting on a ginormous pile of cash and their products are still flying off of the shelves, so what gives here? Is this just a bunch of rich geezers trying to not have to pay an extra 5% on their vig because of the rise in capital gains in January?
Leveraged buyers who got in late are seeing their profits melting away. Margin calls are kicking in.
AAPL is the hedge fund hottie. First everybody bought, now everyone is rushing for the exits. It could actually mean that this stock will become attractive if it falls another 15 % or more.
 
APPL is starting to look like a capitulation trade here. The losses are staggering. For a minute there, it crashed to 504, and a few moments later it bounced back up to 510. I wonder if she slides lower than five hundred today, and if so, does that trigger massive automatic selling.
 
According to ZH (yeah, I know) many of the hedgies and mutual funds have been selling for awhile now, trying (in vain?) not to stampede things.
 
...man, Reggie Middleton from BoomBustBlog.com, was again spot on arguing for Apple's demise (financial), right before the all-time top. This man is golden!
 
This latest drop seems to be caused by one of their suppliers reporting lousy sales (or just plain they mis-estimated and built up too much inventory).

As was pointed out by another engineer, this needn't mean apples sales numbers will stink...there's a hint they simply went with another suppliers parts - everyone is cheaper than Cirrus on a lot of this, I've never designed them into mass market stuff for that reason.

On the other hand, it could be as suspected, and further, a ball rolling downhill this fast tends to keep on rolling.
 
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