AAPL, Apple

aapl july 2011 l aapl july 19 2011

AAPL has not bothered to look back during it’s trek north. After hours it is reporting earnings and having been wrong on this one big time before i am going to hazard another guess. This stock can easily hit $400 even this evening. The reason for my guessing (yes, guessing) that it will go up is that there is no clear way to count the move from the lows, now more than two years ago. There is no A-B-C which would not make much sense anyway given the size of this move. Nor is there a clear 5-wave sequence up. A rough count would yield 1-2-3-4-5-6 which means that 7-8-9 are missing. We will know soon enough.

IBM update

IBM reported excellent earnings which took the stock up by about $9 or 5%. The results may have been good but not that good. So the peak is in or almost so. Here are the short and long-term charts again;

ibm july 19 2011 l ibm july 19 2011 s

See also previous blog. I reiterate that this stock is a sell.  Looking at the detailed chart on the right (click on it to enlarge) it has stayed within it’s channel for two years and more. Only today it “throws-over” if there is such a word. This typically is an exhaustion move.

Looking at the long-term chart it is truly amazing what this stock has done (after 25 years of doing nothing). The count shown may or may not be correct but even so we are fast approaching the point where wave 5 is equal to wave 3 (at about $193???). This would be highly unusual especially for a non-commodity stock. Waves 3 may not be the shortest and mostly are the longest. Ergo in all likely hood the stock will not trade beyond that point. I certainly would not wait for it to get there.

BKN, BlackRock Investment Quality Municipal Trust Inc.

BKN

This is a look at the “municipal bond market”. In the English language the word bond is sometimes reserved for higher level government entities. Also bonds are a general, unsecured obligation. In contrast “debentures” are mostly secured by specific assets and do not necessarily constitute a general obligation of the issuer. The English use the two terms interchangeable but in a different way than the Americans. To make a long story short, municipal bonds are often debentures with some underlying legal agreement that spells out rather precisely from what sources repayment is to come. So it is possible that the City of New York issues “bonds” that serve to pay for the ferry-boats. If usage drops off sharply, for whatever reason, the City itself is not on the hook! This is very dangerous stuff if you are not completely up to date on the underlying agreement. Lately Mrs. Meridith Whitney made a few splashes by suggesting this area would crater big time. Others took a different view.

Looking at it from an EW perspective it looks like  Meridith Whitney may be barking up the right tree after all. Time will tell.

ELUXY, Electrolux AB update.

eluxy july 19

See previous blog of July 7th.  The stock did not wait long and decided today to continue it’s trek down by about $7 or 16%. If this gap is the midpoint of a third wave, $31 might be next  ( this would also make wave 3 approximately 1.618x wave 1 ) but the ultimate target is more in the order of $15/$10, again see previous blog.