I don't know where you stand in your AAPL position in terms of profit.
Last year, I traded in and out of AAPL several times successfully. The last time I was holding after the November gap up, took partial profits, and trailed a stop that got taken out during a rare intraday dip.
I spent the next 3 weeks or so trying to find a way back into the stock, and finally did towards the end of December. I regretted setting the stop as tight as I did.
I remember some months back Reid and I had a similar conversation, and he suggested that probably the best and simplest approach was to just hold, since AAPL even then was obviously gathering strength and showing no signs of slowing down at all. In retrospect, he was right, and I would have done better. But I thought the same thing you are thinking now---that AAPL eventually will dip down and get very oversold, and there I could buy shares cheaply. Well... AAPL hasn't seen anything resembling oversold in almost a year, and spends very little time in the lower half of the BBs.
139.142.147.218
So my presumption was just plain wrong. Works well with most stocks, but AAPL is just too strong to assume oversold openings will present themselves at attractive prices periodically. The oversold opening you are waiting for may well occur, but most likely will be at prices higher than the current levels!
The way I played AAPL this last time was to accumulate shares in late December as it eased sideways along the 20 ema. I knew it was very likely there would be a strong move after earnings, and there was.
I had taken an unusually large position, so when AAPL moved above 70, I sold a portion of the position, then placed a very loose stop on the rest.
The strategy with the stop is different than usual: here, I just want to protect against unanticipated catastrophe.
AAPL has more than tripled over the past year. If it doubles this year, that's probably better than I could hope to do by trading in and out, so my plan now is to just hold.
In a way, AAPL is not that good of a trading stock----although the beta is 1.8, that is misleading since the volatility tends to be mostly to the upside. A good trading stock has high volatility but swings from extreme oversold to extreme overbought cyclically with minimal bias to either the upside or the downside.
Again, taking partial profits is the key that allows you to have your cake and eat it too, and makes it easy to weather corrections that never last very long.
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