Upfront disclosure – I’ve never been an Apple fan. My dislike started with my first ipod and the cluster of dealing with itunes and trying to load songs from my CDs. I think their marketing is/was phenomenal – “you’re a Genius if you buy our products”. LOL. You can’t go wrong appealing to the vanity or intelligence of your customers.

These days however, AAPL isn’t looking quite as smart as the competition catches up.  Here’s a recent article talking about slowing sales of the iphone and how Samsung is now the Number 1 manufacturer of smart phones in the world.

The pace of iPhone sales has slowed, Apple revealed last week. Part of the problem is that the competition has found a formula that works: thinner phones with big screens that make the iPhone look small and chubby.

For a dose of smartphone envy, iPhone owners need to look no further than Samsung Electronics Co., the number-one maker of smartphones in the world. Its newest flagship phone, the Galaxy S III, is sleek and wafer-thin.

By comparison, the iPhone “is getting a bit long in the tooth,” says Ramon Llamas, an analyst with research firm IDC.

Apple has become the world’s most valuable company on the back of the iPhone, which makes up nearly half of its revenue. IPhone sales are still growing, but the question of how fast they’re growing is of keen interest to investors. The iPhone certainly has room to grow: only one in six smartphones sold globally in the second quarter had an Apple logo on its back.

When Apple reported financial results for its latest quarter last week, a new phenomenon was revealed: Buyers started pulling back on iPhone purchases just six months after the launch of the latest iPhone model.

A look at AAPL Chart also shows weakness. A series of lower highs since the early April peak at 644. The stock has found support at it’s pivot twice since it’s May 20 bottom at $522 but the pullbacks at R2 in July tell me there will not be another breakout in the near term. Also look at the declining volume over the last 3 days of buying.

I’m not saying this is a short right now – but if AAPL fails again at R2 (now at $615) then there is $41 dollars (7%) of gain to be had if it pulls back to the pivot yet again

I just read the chessNwine post on swing trading SPY on the 30 minute table and wanted to put it in context of the daily correlation to the SPX.

As you can see we almost reached the top of the daily channel off the June 4 bottom.  From that view it looks a lot more likely that we are going back down than breaking out.

My plan is to intitiate a short position via SDS later in the day.

An excellent post by SemiBizz over at tradertalk:

So when we have a reduced flow of volume, we see inequities in the market, when we see inequities in the market, indicators can get stretched on inequitable data as operators (F’eds) can influence markets under light volume conditions (like buying the futures market overnight or rigging the bond markets) and until STRONG VOLUME comes into the market these conditions persist.  When these conditions persists we see BEARISH UPTHRUSTS in the market, and that brings us back to summertime light volume, extreme indications that need to be filtered for the trading environment and why… per Eminmee – we see “choppy” rallies.
Now the period of light volume summer trading should be ending in the near time frame… which brings me back to AUGUSTS.

FIRST, lt’s reference… THE LAST MONTH OF HIGHEST VOLUME  AUGUST 2011, the last week of highest volume AUGUST 2011.  This is still fresh, we all remember the events associated with the US Downgrade and our shameful Washington melodrama.

Now let’s look at August 2007, at the time it was the ALL TIME MONTHLY HIGHEST VOLUME, and it was the 1370 low ahead of the November 2007 – 1576 ALL TIME high… 206 pts in  just 3 months.
Now let’s look at August 2008,  a very quiet month on unusually light volume and just very sideways, the high for that month at 1313 which was the high of the BEAR MARKET LOW leg to 666.August 2008 was the “CALM BEFORE THE STORM” as what was normally supposed to be a bias UP Election Year into October, turned into the BIGGEST CRASH OF ALL TIME.
So my point pretty simple here looking ahead.  We should see stronger volume come into the market per seasonal trends, but THE ONE EXCEPTION is a month like we had in 2008, when the volume did not come and the market went into “wait and see” mode – sideways on light volume.

If we don’t see MUCH STRONGER VOLUME, and this market goes into indecisive mode, WATCH OUT.  OTHERWISE, expect volume to pick up dramatically, and you don’t have to stick your neck out, because HISTORY is ON YOUR SIDE.  You can wait for TREND CHANGE or CONFIRMATION based on just one indicator as long as we can still trust it and that is VOLUME.

History says if you get it wrong, you are going to be VERY WRONG, and if you get this right you are going to be VERY RIGHT

First thanks to Allan at Traders Talk for this blog idea. I think most of the readers at IBC are traders rather than investors and there is a big difference. For a trader to succeed you must have discipline. That means you have to have a strategy and rules. In this post we’ll talk about both.

The 60 minute charts below for RUT & BKX show a great strategy and an easy way to implement rules. In both of these the chartist has identified boxes (channels/ ranges) the indexes are moving in. These channels provide a strategy long or short and also a way to implement stop loss rules that minimize downside risk (stops noted on charts) .

I didn’t note the targets in the charts: –

If short: the target would be the bottom of the respective boxes.

If Long: you would play the breakout with a trailing stop at your buy point for starters. You would move that trailing stop up as the breakout continues to lock in profits as the move starts to fail