AAPL Scores Historic Daily Gains, Shows Resilience Amid Death Cross Fears

Last week, Apple’s stock (NASDAQ: AAPL) officially entered “death cross” territory for the second time. As CNBC noted in its reporting, a death cross is described as the point at which a stock’s 50-day moving average crosses below its 200-day moving average.

Blue Line Futures president Bill Bausch pointed out, albeit it a rare situation, “Apple has gone lower than I thought it would,” referring to news that AAPL had lost nearly 36 percent of its value before hitting the seemingly Satanic milestone on December 21. 

At the time of our reporting that day, AAPL was trading at $150.73 per share, marking significant losses of just over 36 percent from its all-time high of $232.07 per share back on October 3.

Of course, there are many factors that ultimately play into a company’s stock value — its quarterly earnings and revenue, major breakthroughs or innovations, and even extremely positive (or negative) news coverage, for example. 

Apple, in recent months, has suffered a barrage of reports hinting at sub-stellar iPhone demand, slashed production and other Wall Street-roiling concerns, which can certainly explain why AAPL has performed so badly, even despite all the new iPhones, iPads and Macs that were unveiled earlier this fall.

Taking Stock

While it’s still well below the all-time high which rendered it the world’s first trillion-dollar company back in August, Apple on Wednesday made history once again when it posted its biggest single-day gains (of +7.04 percent) since back in April 2014. 

Wednesday, as some may know, saw the Dow jump over 1,000 points — and so Apple’s gains, although significant in their own regard, weren’t an isolated episode of resurgence. Still, at a time when the company has analysts and investors literally hanging onto the edge of their seats, it’s a sizable gain that has some insiders feeling hopeful for the future.

One of them, Bloomberg highlighted in a report this week, is former Piper Jaffray analyst and Loup Ventures founder, Gene Munster, who believes that even despite its losses thus far, AAPL is likely to make sizable gains and ultimately could be the top-performing FAANG stock in 2019.

WTF Is FAANG?

Apple is among an “elite group” of technology stocks trading on the NASDAQ exchange, known as FAANG. They include Facebook (F), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Alphabet (GOOG), accordingly.

As Bloomberg notes, AAPL is currently the second-worst-performing stock among the FAANG five this year and, along with Facebook, is the only other of the bunch having posted such big losses.

Even despite the slump, Apple’s surge on Wednesday has Munster voicing optimism that APPL will wind up “leading the pack” [of FAANG stocks] in 2019. 

What’s really interesting, is that the long-time analyst’s prediction isn’t predicated on the iPhone maker’s likelihood of selling products in 2019 — but rather, on the likelihood that its biggest rivals (i.e. Google and Facebook) will continue to be hit by similar European-style privacy regulations. Apple, for the most part, will be able to side-skirt those regulations since it’s not in the business of harvesting and selling user data like Google and Facebook.

AAPL, at the time of this write-up, was closed for daily trading at $156.15 per share — which is down about a buck from this week’s high of $157.17.