Thursday, March 15, 2012

Apple (AAPL) rising too fast: I smell a high frequency trade pump and dump

Boy the big trading firms hate Apple (AAPL)! Here is a massively successful company that puts out innovative products geared toward high-profit, democracy-promoting interconnectedness and user-friendliness. That right there, is a spit in the eye of the self-appointed market king makers, the we-tell-people-what-to-be-and-do, different-set-of-rules-for-us, risk-as-cocaine egomaniacs that think that companies and markets, nay, THE WORLD, should follow their orders.

Oh, and Apple just happens NOT to give out dividends AND parks its gains in nearly 100 billion (with a "B") of cash and cash-equivalent securities with less than a one percent annual return. Here is a company, AAPL, not "playing the (corrupted) market," not acceding to the returns extortion being perpetrated on savers in an attempt to force their money into the essentially counterfeit value casino the stock market has become.

Steve Jobs may not have been one of the easiest guys to get along with but he was no dummy. He knows how unsound the market is, and it's almost like he's teasing these clever-by-half crooks and arrogant jerks from the grave with this huge sack 'o cash. Talk about threatening the manhood of these Wall Street "play-ahs".

Short take: The Wall Street psychopaths are looking for revenge against the super-rich nerd and his company. They'll figure: "Let's see if we can crash the value of this company by manipulating demand past the fundamentals, thus creating an AAPL bubble. Boost volume at the margins to tweak the market into a buying stampede. Then we'll short it, and see how much money we can make both ways and hopefully screw over this damn upstart (turned behemoth) that thinks it can play its own game. We'll take a big chunk of this AAPL pie AND take it down a peg."

I'm not handing out stock advice, but in my assessment the recent vertical rise in Apple share price is way too steep for comfort or for fundamentals (even for a popular company). I smell manipulation, and I sense a downturn, not a crash, but an "adjustment" in line with fundamentals. AAPL is generally a well-run company, (despite some of the Chinese labor practices, etc.) with good products and a lot of cash. They can't be blackmailed, like Greece, with sleazy derivatives contracts and margin calls into playing where they don't want to play. Personally I hope AAPL whacks these villains but hard.

We'll see...

Disclosure: No positions