First, have a look at technicals that preceded the situation. On 3 months/daily charts DIA (ETF that tracks DJIA), QQQQ (ETF that tracks Nasdaq) and AAPL itself were at the bullish cross on daily stochastic. In Technical Analysis, a most favorable setup for reversal of direction. Crossovers are like an avalanches, once at the cross, very few technical investors/traders are willing to go against the cross, as it signals end of current down trend and start of a new uptrend. This usually snowballs all the way until stochastic reaches 80%, where the whole cycle gets exhausted and the whole process starts to develop in reverse. In any case betting against these indicators usually gets you squashed, so many technical traders either go long or stay away from shorting for the time of the cycle. In card counting analogy, this is a huge spike in high count where you start increasing your bets because your chances to win are mathematically much higher.

As you can see in 3 months/daily charts below, Dow, Nasdaq and Apple just crossed bullish on stochastic. Avalanche started and Dow and Nasdaq started to gain as expected. Not Apple. See the two intraday charts at the bottom of this page. When we switch the view to the more precise view to 3day/5min chart, at EXACT point where AAPL should head for a huge breakout, new Jobs' health scare rumor was introduced.

In technical analysis, ascending triangles more often than not result in breakouts. That is huge spikes in price. The point of the breakout is tip of the triangle wherever increasing higher low eventually meets top resistance. When this point is reached, we usually see a spike because a lot of technical shorters have their stops set in these critical spots and breakout traders have their entries set a little bit above those which combined creates that spike. In order for spike to materialize you need market to be cooperating and trading higher which as you can see on intraday DIA chart was happening and the uptrend not only continued well into the day but also next day. (which is expected because on dailies all theses crossed bullish on stochastic)

Amazingly at the very point where AAPL's spike at the tip of the ascending triangle should happen,  rumor was introduced and killed the setup completely. I mean you can have things to happen unexpectedly. It happens all the time, it is a stock market, but to have them placed this precise when everything else is taking off, AAPL included, makes me believe, there is more than meets the eye why AAPL price is down. If this rumor was not introduced, price of AAPL would be somewhere around $93.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK. Here is updated chart 2 days after. Today finally happened what was due to happen on Tuesday. We had today the same ascending triangle like on Tuesday, DJIA and Nasdaq were cooperative same as they were on Tuesday, but with one little difference today. Nobody introduced a lousy rumor to sabotage the pop. As you can see AAPL popped right at the tip of the ascending triangle as it "should".

This of course makes a huge difference to options traders. If the pop wasn't sabotaged on Tuesday, AAPL wouldn't be fighting today resistance @90.50 but at 95.40! One buck difference with at the money options on just 10 calls makes difference of $1000 bucks. If the difference is 4 bucks that's $4000. If you happened to have 50 January calls, they just robbed you with that rumor move of $20,000 dollar gain!