AAPL Stock – The Trader’s Guide to Apple Inc.’s Q2 Earnings

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Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock is trading up higher by roughly 17% year-to-date, and heading into Monday’s Apple earnings report, it continues to look constructive through the technical analysis lens.

beat the bell stock investing adviceIf you’re looking to buy into or make a trade on Apple shares around this report, read on as we look at the well-defined support and resistance zones you can use to manage your risk.

AAPL is set to report earnings Monday after the close, and Wall Street is expecting profits of $2.11 per share on $55.19 billion in revenues. Moreover, analysts expect Apple to have shipped 55 million iPhones and 14 million iPads. While the Apple Watch is just about to go on sale and thus no sales of it will be reflected in the earnings report, analysts still will be listening for any sales guidance.

AAPL Stock Charts

For the better part of the past 12 months or so, AAPL stock has been better to hold onto than traded too frequently. The rise in shares has been orderly, but unless one quickly spotted the few weeks in which Apple shares were strongly trending higher, it was easy to get caught up in the choppy consolidation phases.

Looking at the multiyear price chart of the Apple stock price below, the big technical event last year was when AAPL broke past its 2012 highs in October and thus began the next leg higher.

The bears will point to the fact that almost the entire rally since last October has come on waning upside momentum, per the Relative Strength Index (RSI) at the bottom of the chart. Bulls, however, may note that the ascent has also seen two big consolidation phases that have kept the stock from rising too steeply, thus buffering the risk of a sharp mean-reversion move lower.

Translation: The waning upside momentum is a result of constructive consolidation phases in AAPL stock.

aapl stock charts weekly
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Looking at the daily chart of Apple stock below, the sight is equally constructive.

aapl stock charts daily
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As I have pointed to numerous times before for the stock, AAPL’s 50-, 100- and 200-day simple moving averages have been fantastic reference and support lines for the past 12 months. So, following Monday’s Apple earnings report, traders and investors will want to see how AAPL stock reacts/holds on any of these moving averages in case of price weakness — particularly the 100-day moving average (blue line), which has held as support both in mid-October and again in early January.

Tactically, and following any price weakness after the earnings report, any bullish reversal around the 100-day MA would likely be another buying opportunity.

On the upside, a post-earnings rally could confirm the next leg higher in the stock and out of the consolidation phase that has been in place since mid-February. In that case, the next tactical upside target would be the $140 area.

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Download Serge’s trading plan in the Essence of Swing Trading e-book here. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2015/04/aapl-stock-the-traders-guide-to-apple-inc-q2-earnings/.

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