ANOTHER... LIKE WE DIDNT SEE THIS COMING... DOW <10K AND APPLE SELLS >10M iPhones

DOW JONES
Less than 10K!!! Tim must be dancing in the streets if not on a bull...I had to post today... My option positions are so tiny... but they are banking 100%+ (puts in RHT, MSFT, FXI. my lone stock which i forgot to sell was AUY. and so GLD as a choice over AUY a month ago would have been better. but hey... no sense crying over that. i am already lost for the year.

AAPL and iPHONE
As for Apple. They seem to have sold their 10M iPhone wayyyy ahead of expectation (10M in 2008 was the stated goal). And so with their earnings announcement soon (i think Apple has announced plans to conduct a conference call to discuss financial results of its fourth fiscal quarter on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 2pm PT/5pm ET.). it will be interesting to watch... for one thing no one expected Apple to have possibly sold 7M this Q (their 4th Q). The high estimate was 5M. iPhone is the #1 Smartphone in the U.S. However, the whole Macro/Micro-eco has surely made AAPL dirt cheap as it actually dipped to 87 today... and rallied strong to finish green today...

Patience is necessary... my plan short term... keep all my puts (RHT, MSFT, FXI) and hedge with AAPL calls around earnings. The plan is buy a call and put prior to earnings... after the last earnings, where AAPL gave poor guidance, the stock opened down huge only to be barely in the red. So, a put prior to earnings and buying a call at the open would have netted 500% or in one case .01 option turned into 1.0... in real money $1 to $100. But who knows... AAPL has announced good guidance for 1Q last year. Thus, having one call prior to earnings could work out as well. We'll see what is going on at the time... it will be a decision made based on varying factors.

And the newest MacBooks apparently are rumored to have a air craft quality aluminum production process that in the PC world is totally revolutionary. In which they take a block of aluminum and mold it into a laptop - interesting, but still a rumor. What we do know is what the CFO stated at last Q earnings: 'Apple's competitors won't be able to match' for some time to come.' hmm. can't wait. my wife needs to dump her piece of junk Dell. btw, all windows based PCs not investing in Linux are doomed. Ironically, Macs are the fastest machines to run Windows... who woulda thunk it...