By now it is clear Apple (AAPL) has fallen off a cliff after a parabolic rise. History says the fall will at least retrace the parabolic rise. We saw this recently with Crude Oil rising over several years into a parabolical peak at $147 (cash price), then falling in six months to $31 before bottoming. We saw this in 2000 with a bunch of tech stocks, and in particular the leader at the time, Microsoft (MSFT). Is AAPL, the leader in 2012, replicating MSFT, the leader in 2000? The charts are eerily similar (courtesy Bespoke): Click Here for Charts
History also says a bull trap will emerge on the way down, a major bounce where many think they have caught the bottom, but when it reverses, they instead get sliced & diced as if grabbing a falling knife. Same bulltrap happened to crude on its rapid drop. The AAPL false bottom may have already occurred around $500 (see chart). After bouncing at that level, it has hit an airpocket and now seems on a bottomless journey down. A scan of the punditry finds some expectation for a bottom at $410, and I expect that level to catch some bids, but a look at the chart (red line) shows no support level until AAPL gets to the start of the parabolic spike up, at around $350.
Apple is a quality company, and its recent miss seem to be more an anomaly of comparing a 14 week quarter a year ago with the 13 week quarter that recently ended than a sudden break in Apple’s trajectory. Hence, at some point, a bottom will be found, and a buying opportunity discovered; the bigger question is whether, like Microsoft’s lost decade, will Apple grow quite strongly but never regain the recent stock highs? Maybe there is an app for that…