But can this market rally without Apple, even intraday?
Here's my take. You may not be able to pin down the correlation, but it has become highly unlikely to have a big rally in this market without Apple participating, if only because it has become ingrained in the American stock psyche like no other equity I have ever seen.
It simply colors everything, and when it goes down, there is a presumption that something is very wrong. And if it is very wrong with Apple, it has to be really wrong for everything else, except perhaps its enemy Google.
Now here's a bit of semi-circular reasoning: Even if you were to take Apple out of the indexes so that they wouldn't be biased by it, I still don't think the impact would be lessened. This stock has become the heart and soul of stock trading, and everyone and his brother seems to have a chart of where it fails and where it holds and where it bounces and where it gets rebuffed.Until it gets back into a gentle rise, something that can happen as it changes the tenor of the iPhone maps discussion--hey it can happen, just as Steve Jobs changed the tenor of the antenna conversation--I think we are going to be trapped by it in one form or another. It's just too important.
This is a shame. Apple's issues are really self-inflicted. It could have kept Google Maps for now while working on its own system, which I have now used and believe is, theoretically, far superior to Google's, except that it doesn't have the right information programmed into it.
But until Apple comes up with an answer that's better than "I'm sorry," I think that we will be reading off the Apple chart, and that means we are in no-man's land--which means that the overall market might be in no-man's land too.
Disclosure: Cramer's charitable trust is long AAPL.
