The divergence yesterday was unmistakeable. The once infallible Apple began to trade lower and as the day wore on it got lower and lower. The holiday cheer turned to jeers as the mighty Apple came back to the ground after soaring higher all year long. Up almost 75% for the year at one point, it now stands a mere 30% or so higher - less than other tech heavy weights like eBAY and Amazon. Oh how the titans have fared. With such a weighting in the all the indexes, the fall of Apple contained the desire for the general equities to work higher. It accounts for something like 20% of the NDX, 5% of the entire SPX. Those are not small numbers. If Apple is indeed done, it will take a few companies moving higher to take up its slack.

This morning it is off to a roaring start, down another $8 as I write and heading for $530. It is there that volume lays and we'll see if a 11% hair cut in a week is enough for now.

Elsewhere it is the same story as it has been. The market is in a large consolidation pattern with a yearning desire to head higher again. The central banks are overly accommodating and likely to do more so. Countries around the world are trying to prop up equities with Taiwan basically intervening in their markets with direct purchases, China doing the same yesterday, and Japan manipulating the currency rates to prop up theirs. It simply doesn't end.

The BOE and ECB did their announcements this morning, the Middle East is coming apart at the seems as the Islamic fundamentalist attempt to hijack the revolution in Egypt just as it was done in Iran some 33 years ago. The Syrian dictator is about to collapse as Patriot missiles are sent to Turkey. Yet oil languishes at lows. Doesn't that tell us something about how robust these world economies are?

We could go on and on but in the end, its' what the markets do, not what you or I think and right now they are in a large consolidation and not telling us much about which side wins in the end. So we wait ...