Terrific Tuesday – Apple Tests $160 Again

The bull is back! 

Well, it never left but it paused for a day and that’s something, right? As is often the case when the markets need a lift, Apple (AAPL) is getting a boost and, since it’s in the Dow, the $10 run this month has added 85 of the Dow’s 1,000 points but, in the S&P 500, AAPL is a whopping 4% of the S&P 500’s weight so the 6.66% run from $150 to $160 adds 0.25% to the S&P, which is up 100 points (4%) over that time.

In the Nasdaq, fuggedaboutit, as AAPL is closing in on 15% of the Nasdaq’s total weight so adding 1% to the index all by itself from that run while the entire index is up 4% so 25% of the move comes from AAPL and probably another 25% from AAPL suppliers!  

Boosting some of the key components in an index through upgrades, M&A rumors or straight-up buying of the stocks is a great way to mask selling by Fund Managers and Banksters when they don’t want to scare off the Retail Investors while they move to CASH!!! (have I mentioned how much I love CASH!!! lately?).

Yesterday, for example, the Nasdaq finished up but 1,514 stocks declined while only 1,370 advanced in the index. A falling Advance/Decline Line is one of the things we watch for if there’s going to be a correction, so we’ll be keeping an eye on it during earnings but nothing to worry about… yet.

Meanwhile, it’s earnings season and yesterday we got a beat from Schwab (SCHW) and SONC (SONC) although the latter blamed the hurricanes for any shortfalls.KMG (KMG) and Netflix (NFLX) missed but Netflix was immediately forgiven by rabid fans, who are happily paying the 10% rate hike which will, hopefully, compensate for their profligate spending. NFLX did add 4.5M new subscribers and, at $13/month, that’s $702M/yr in new revenues added in just one quarter – not bad! Unfortunately, they have also increased content spending by $1Bn/yr ($8Bn now) – so we’ll see how things go for them but the bottom line is they burned $465M in cash last Q – not good.