ES closes the last four days as follows:

1310.50, 1310.75, 1311 and today 1310.50

Does anybody still think that there is no market manipulation? As usual, volume was almost non-existent and well below average.

Given that we are being set up nicely, where the retail is encouraged to buy buy buy by various talking heads of CNBC and other MSM, this itself should raise the red flag that there is cliff ahead.

Everything is screaming for a reversal but the money flowing in from Europe is keeping the US stock markets alive. Some of the reversal patterns are so rare that they happen once in a while and yet we are hanging on. Can the market defy gravity forever?  Unless there is more free money infused by the Feb, it cannot. So may be one more day we will have to bear the agony. In the mean time, gold down, silver down, oil down, copper down and equities barely moved!

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As I'm writing this post, AAPL has broken out to make an all-time high of 468.95 in after-hours trading after releasing their latest earnings report. I last wrote about AAPL on January 9th and mentioned a couple of possible scenarios. One was a pullback to re-test November lows, and the other was a run-up by market makers into earnings.

The Daily chart below shows where tonight's price was hit…above the +2 deviation level of the upward-trending regression channel which began at the June 2010 lows. When tomorrow's candle opens, it may re-test tonight's high before dropping. Near-term support would sit, firstly, at the +1 deviation level around 440, followed by this month's Volume Profile POC (yellow horizontal line) at 422.32…the next level would lie at the channel "mean" (currently at 412.35), and, subsequently, at the 50 sma (red) at 397.15.

As I mentioned in my previous post, AAPL has, so far, been unable to remain above its +1 deviation level of this channel…we'll see whether the same applies over the next days/weeks ahead, or whether it's "different this time"…with 500.00 within reach, who knows!

http://strawberryblondesmarketsummary.blogspot.com/

Well, Apple (AAPL) – – which, like GOOG, I pretty much never trade – – blew the doors off again. It's trading about $35 higher than its close price and has slapped about 26 points onto the /NQ as of this writing.

The company is nothing short of amazing. Pretty incredible what consistently fabulous products and a well-managed organization can do for a stock price, isn't it?

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