Ongoing themes in Technical Analysis

These posts are dedicated to Forex for the most part but I tend to diversify my domains of attention to these ideas when making observations

• EUR/USD
• The Dollar Index
• S&P 500 [SPX or ES futures]
• Dow 30 
• CBOE Vix Index, which includes VXX, TVIX and XIV
• The Carry Trade and its swaps [collecting interest everday]
• AAPL - getting income from AAPL 

AAPL is in a current state of unwinding its uptrend for the year.  It is inbetween a sell and a short term swing buy.  What looks best in terms of risk/reward for options income is a 162/158 bearish put spread to profit on the downswing from today's closing price and its bottoming formation at 158 or slightly above.  

The daily chart shown below features bollinger bands with a central band indicating the mean at $160.15, and the upper and lower bands at $164.95 and $155.6; price departed from its highs at 164 in quick fashion today and Friday of last week, that type of price action is favorable to the bears who were even able to drive it to within pennies of the mean.  

What does this tell us?

Interim lows, and deeper price retracements are still income generating opportunities and should we get some momentum to the downside the lashes back (counter trend bounces) will be profitable set ups.  

Specifically for this time frame reaching and staying near $160 for tomorrow is highly likely.  From there price has a good probability of getting to the lower end of the summer trading range at 155.0, its very interesting to see how each levels of the band are coming together at these price points:  the upper band is near 165, the mean is at 160, and the lower band is at roughly 155.00.  These conditions could change in a heartbeat, but from my point of view I favor 155 and 150 as potential set ups for options income when it involves verticals and bullish put spreads.  

Note also that the gap fill would be compelte at $150.27 which sits right above the bullish candle put in place on 8/1/2017 [Earnings Gap]

This one covers the risk to reward set up in this trade.  It is writing a bearish call spread with a strike price of $163.50 by $166 to receive credit and it makes money as the stock price goes sideways or down, so any movement in the dark yellow rectangle is a good location to make money on the call options expiring worthless.  Also, The green zone highlighted from 162 to 155 makes money on the entire height of the green zone.  This trade makes more money the faster it goes down.  The losses are also contained or maxed out at the high end of 164+