So much for my boredom with the market. It wasn’t a necessarily spectacular day today but it turned out to be my best day in a month. But like much of the action of late it was a bit of a struggle. The swoon around 11:00 almost stopped me out of Broadcom (BRCM) and made me (decide to) miss a great entry on Silicon Motion (SIMO) which would have been the trade of the day (over 6R). Here’s a chart of SIMO, the one that got away:

Although I know all (most) of us short-term traders are watching the same 5 stocks on any given day I was amused to see that Jamie’s two trades of the day were two stocks that I also traded today — BRCM and Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL). (I also picked up some AAPL in my long-term account. Let’s see if it can make new highs…) I knew that Apple’s news today was huge (some would say ‘game changing‘) so I made sure to watch it closely. Although I don’t use price targets I always check the daily chart to see what kind of potential a move could have. There were still a few points for Apple to reach its 50-day moving average so I figured it was worth trying to ride it there. (Don’t tell the fundie guys but it closed pretty much right on the 50 DMA.) Here’s the daily chart of Apple followed by an intraday chart (15 minute bars).

If there was one thing for the bulls to complain about today it was the lack of volume to go along with new highs on the Nasdaq and S&P 500. I don’t think that’s a major concern though, since On Balance Volume still looks good on those indices. SO barring some (bad) news I still think the upper Bollinger Band on the S&P will get tagged.

Here are charts of the Nasdaq, Nasdaq 100 (NDX), S&P 500 and the Dow: