What Apple is Signaling about a Market Top

by Guest Author by Albertarocks

Global Economic Intersection Article of the Week

When a general stops leading his army mass surrender usually soon follows.  Very often when an index begins to lose leadership from its general the entire complex soon finds itself in big trouble. If there was ever an index that had a singular more important hard-core heavyweight leader than the Nasdaq 100 has in AAPL, I’d like to know what index that was.  AAPL now makes up a full 17% of the market capitalization of the entire $NDX.  So obviously when an enormous corporation like AAPL starts to take a bit of a bruising, it behooves us to take a real close look at what’s going on.  (Click on picture for larger image of apple face.)

Follow up:

The enormity of the effect that AAPL has on the entire $NDX can’t be overstated. Only last April its weighting had been reduced from 22% to 12%. Today, only 10 months later, that weighting has made another astonishing burst back up to 17%. The only other heavy hitters in any index that I’m aware of which even comes close to having the weighting that AAPL has, are Simons Property Group which makes up approximately 10% of IYR (real estate ETF) and IBM which makes up about 12% of the DOW. With a market cap. of $446 billion, AAPL is now slightly greater than twice the size of IBM. The bank account? With $98 billion cash on hand, AAPL now sports a cushion 6 times that of IBM. If AAPL really wanted to buy something nice they could certainly afford it. May I suggest Greece?
Before we dive in, just a few notes for clarification. I don't mean to insult anyone here, but it has come to my attention that there are some people whose eyes glaze over when dealing with a chart that is made up from a ratio. There's nothing to it really. In fact, all currency crosses are the same thing... just a ratio:

a) When viewing ‘any’ ratio chart, think of it as a ‘leadership gauge’. In all cases, what we’re really doing is dividing the component on the left side of the ratio (the ‘numerator’), by the component on the right side. In this particular instance, AAPL is the 'numerator' and is 'the component being judged' for leadership and not the Nasdaq. But of course the ultimate goal of any division operation is to generate the "quotient". It answers the question "How many AAPLs can we buy with one unit of NDX?" We then put that quotient on the chart in the form of the ratio itself... the candlesticks. What we're really after is to reveal what the ratio is doing and what it means for the broader index itself. The purpose of this study is not to discern when to buy or sell AAPL, but the NAS.

b) In order to improve the ‘viewability’ of a ratio-style chart, I’ve changed the way I display them from the method I used to employ, in order to make them far less "busy".. Rather than to overlay the two individual comparators behind the ratio itself, I’ve placed them in the upper section of the chart in separate panels so that they appear as individual line charts. But the all-important ratio, the subject of our focus, is still shown in the heart of the chart as candlesticks. In every ratio chart, any indicators that are displayed pertain to the ratio itself and not to either of its components.

Again, I apologize to those who already understand how ratios charts work, but out of respect for our friends who have been a bit reluctant to admit they didn't know, I just wanted to offer that bit of clarification. We start by taking a look below at the weekly chart of the ratio between Apple and $NDX:

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