An AAPL a Day Keeps the Doctor Away?

Let's suppose it's April 2003.  You've got about $400,000 saved up for retirement.  For some reason, you decide to put it all - your entire life savings - into AAPL stock, which is trading at about $13-$14 a share, ignoring the advice of your broker who is screaming "Diversify!" at you.  Let's say you manage to buy 30,000 shares exactly of it.

If you never touched your account after that, today you would have 60,000 shares (because of a stock split) of AAPL at $404.30 a share - more than $24 million, and that's down from the recent high.  The stock has increased more than 60-fold in value over the past 8 1/2 years, has the highest market capitalization in the entire market now, and makes up approximately 200% of the NASDAQ.

It has vexed bearish traders who keep getting burned on their shorts; it is the poster boy for permabulls who boldly proclaim that "it hasn't even begun to tap China [bubble] and emerging markets [mostly bubbles]".  By now, AAPL is practically a religion:  its announcements have been turned into divine revelation, its products have been deemed holy, and its management staff have been deified.

Now, admittedly, Elliott Wave works better for indices rather than individual stocks, but I have tried a large-scale analysis of AAPL:

The 20-year low in AAPL was the 3.19/share (well, per half-share at the time) at the start of 1998 - the heyday of Microsoft.  Arbitrarily I call the rise to the 2000 "tech bubble" high Primary [1] - it's not particularly important which wave label we use so long as we're consistent.  I could have called it a Micro or Supermillennial wave if I wanted to, but Primary seems appropriate given that we're talking of time scales on the order of a couple of years.

The question lies in whether or not the "Great Recession" decline in the share price in 2008 is Primary [4] or if it's merely part of Primary [3] (e.g. an Intermediate-degree decline).  Given that Primary [3] as I have it labeled represents a 30-fold increase in the share price resulting in a surge to over $100 billion in market capitalization, it would be absurd to consider that merely Intermediate (1) of P[3] - especially given that the move since 2009, which should otherwise be (3) of P[3], is a weaker move than the 2003-07 uptrend.  It could be merely 1 of (3) of P[3], but then you're still looking at a Minor 2 down that would probably drop the share price below $200/share before it sees $1000.

Nevertheless, the chart above clearly shows new highs on lesser and lesser RSI peaks on the weekly chart.  On the monthlies, AAPL's RSI peaked in 2007 and we have made new stock highs on lower monthly RSI in 2011, after having dropped below an RSI of 50.  This is conducive with a wave 5 of large scale.

The daily RSI is still conducive with AAPL making new highs in the coming days to weeks (the hourly RSI, however, says we might already be done), and I haven't tried to count the subwaves - but I would not be surprised if a bleak winter is in store for the bellwether.

Disclosure:  I have no positions, short or long-term, in AAPL and no intention of opening any within the next 72 hours.