Apple (AAPL) Offering Possible 35.14% Return Over the Next 7 Calendar Days

Apple's most recent trend suggests a bullish bias. One trading opportunity on Apple is a Bull Put Spread using a strike $222.50 short put and a strike $217.50 long put offers a potential 35.14% return on risk over the next 7 calendar days. Maximum profit would be generated if the Bull Put Spread were to expire worthless, which would occur if the stock were above $222.50 by expiration. The full premium credit of $1.30 would be kept by the premium seller. The risk of $3.70 would be incurred if the stock dropped below the $217.50 long put strike price.

The 5-day moving average is moving up which suggests that the short-term momentum for Apple is bullish and the probability of a rise in share price is higher if the stock starts trending.

The 20-day moving average is moving up which suggests that the medium-term momentum for Apple is bullish.

The RSI indicator is at 58.52 level which suggests that the stock is neither overbought nor oversold at this time.

To learn how to execute such a strategy while accounting for risk and reward in the context of smart portfolio management, and see how to trade live with a successful professional trader, view more here

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LATEST NEWS for Apple

Apple Pulls App That Tracks Police Activity in Hong Kong
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:39:18 +0000
(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. has pulled the plug on an app that shows police activity in Hong Kong, reversing course yet again as violent pro-democracy protests wrack the city.The U.S. company said Thursday it’s now decided to remove HKmap.live from its App Store after consulting with local authorities, because it could endanger law enforcement and city residents. That marks a return to its original position, where it initially rejected the app. After an outcry, the iPhone maker allowed it to run for a few days before Thursday’s decision. The see-sawing is unusual for Apple, which exercises rigid control over its app store, the foundation of its global iPhone ecosystem.Apple joins other foreign companies struggling to navigate the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as protests that began in June show no sign of abating. The issue has become a red line for those doing business in China, most recently drawing the National Basketball Association into a firestorm over a tweet that’s caused partners to stop doing business with the league and state television to halt airing its games. A growing number of American giants, including Activision Blizzard Inc., find themselves embroiled in controversies over the extent to which their actions are influenced by economic considerations in a vast Chinese market.“Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it,” Apple said in a statement. “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.”Read more: Moment of Truth on China Is Coming for Rest of Corporate AmericaApple’s reversal came after the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper criticized Apple for letting the software through. Protesters in the city used HKmap.live to monitor police whereabouts and it facilitated illegal activities, the People’s Daily said in a commentary late Tuesday. But the app’s developers rejected that view.“We disagree with Apple’s claim that our app endangered anyone” in Hong Kong, the developer said in a statement.Greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, is Apple’s largest market after its own home country. The iPhone maker is also one of the most visible symbols of corporate America in the world’s No. 2 economy. Apple recently pulled the Taiwan flag emoji from some iPhones, underscoring the difficult balance the company must strike in supporting free speech while appeasing China. Beijing has long been sensitive to how foreign companies portray an island it considers part of its territory.Asked about Apple removing the app specifically, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang reiterated Beijing’s stance. “Recent events in Hong Kong are extreme, violent acts, challenging Hong Kong’s rule of law and order, threatening the safety of Hong Kong’s people, damaging Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity,” he said. “We should oppose such violence instead of supporting or condoning them.”How Far Hong Kong’s Emergency Law Can Go (Online Too): QuickTake(Updates with Chinese ministry’s comment in the final paragraph)\–With assistance from April Ma and Sharon Chen.To contact the reporters on this story: Vlad Savov in Tokyo at vsavov5@bloomberg.net;Mark Gurman in San Francisco at mgurman1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Edwin Chan at echan273@bloomberg.net, Peter ElstromFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Apple removes Hong Kong map app after Chinese criticism
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:33:00 +0000
Apple removed a smartphone app that allows Hong Kong activists to report police movements from its online store Thursday after an official Chinese newspaper accused the company of facilitating illegal behavior.

When fintech goes (disastrously) wrong
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:15:50 +0000
Upon opening it, I discovered I had been charged with failing to produce a valid ticket on a Transport for London service — and that I had 21 days to plead either “guilty or not guilty”. TfL said it had sent a letter ahead of this, but I never received it.

Tech Investors Should Brace for a $160 Billion ‘Gut Punch’ in December, Dan Ives
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:10:00 +0000
Investors should mark December 15 on their calendars. “The biggest worry looming remains the December 15 tariff deadline which would be a potential ‘gut punch’ if this tariff is not removed or kicked further down the road by the Trump administration given its negative consequences for semi [conductor] players and the broader tech space with (AAPL) remaining the poster child for these trade worries given its Foxconn flagship iPhone,” Daniel Ives and Strecker Backe said in a note to clients. In September, Apple and other companies in that space got a reprieve after the U.S. exempted cellphones, laptops and other electronic goods from a September round of tariffs.

Amazon Workers May Be Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:00:03 +0000
(Bloomberg) — In a promotional video, Amazon.com Inc. says its Cloud Cam home security camera provides “everything you need to monitor your home, day or night.” In fact, the artificially intelligent device requires help from a squad of invisible employees.Dozens of Amazon workers based in India and Romania review select clips captured by Cloud Cam, according to five people who have worked on the program or have direct knowledge of it. Those video snippets are then used to train the AI algorithms to do a better job distinguishing between a real threat (a home invader) and a false alarm (the cat jumping on the sofa).An Amazon team also transcribes and annotates commands recorded in customers’ homes by the company’s Alexa digital assistant, Bloomberg reported in April.AI has made it possible to talk to your phone. It’s helping investors predict shifts in market sentiment. But the technology is far from infallible. Cloud Cam sends out alerts when it’s just paper rustling in a breeze. Apple Inc.’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa still occasionally mishear commands. One day, engineers may overcome these shortfalls, but for now AI needs human assistance. Lots of it.At one point, on a typical day, some Amazon auditors were each annotating about 150 video recordings, which were  typically 20 to 30 seconds long, according to the people, who requested anonymity to talk about an internal program.The clips sent for review come from employee testers, an Amazon spokeswoman said, as well as Cloud Cam owners who submit clips to troubleshoot such issues as inaccurate notifications and video quality. “We take privacy seriously and put Cloud Cam customers in control of their video clips,” she said, adding that unless the clips are submitted for troubleshooting purposes, “only customers can view their clips.”Nowhere in the Cloud Cam user terms and conditions does Amazon explicitly tell customers that human beings are training the algorithms behind their motion detection software.And despite Amazon’s insistence that all the clips are provided voluntarily, according to two of the people, the teams have picked up activity homeowners are unlikely to want shared, including rare instances of people having sex.Clips containing inappropriate content are flagged as such, then discarded so they aren’t accidentally used to train the AI, the people said. Amazon's spokeswoman said such clips are scrapped to improve the experience of the company's human reviewers, but she didn't say why unsuitable activity would appear in voluntarily submitted video clips.The workers said Amazon has imposed tight security on the Cloud Cam annotation operation. In India, dozens of reviewers work on a restricted floor, where employees aren’t allowed to use their mobile phones, according to two of the people. But that hasn’t stopped other employees from passing footage to non-team members, another person said. The Cloud Cam debuted in 2017 and, along with the Alexa-powered line of Echo speakers, is one of several gadgets Amazon hopes will give it an edge in the emerging smart-home market.The $120 device detects and alerts people to activity going on in their homes and offers them free access to the footage for 24 hours. Users willing to pay about $7 to $20 for a monthly subscription can extend that access for as long as one month and receive tailored alerts—for a crying baby, say, or a smoke alarm. Amazon doesn’t reveal how many Cloud Cams it sells, but the device is just one of many home security cams on the market, from Google’s Nest to Amazon-owned Ring.While AI algorithms are getting better at teaching themselves, Amazon—like many companies—deploys human trainers across its businesses; they help Alexa understand voice commands, teach the company’s automated Amazon Go convenience stores to distinguish one shopper from another and are even working on experimental voice software designed to detect human emotions.Using humans to train the artificial intelligence inside consumer products is controversial among privacy advocates because of concerns its use can expose personal information. The revelation that an Amazon team listens to Alexa voice commands and subsequent disclosures about similar review programs at Google and Apple prompted attention from European and American regulators and lawmakers. The uproar even spurred some Echo owners to unplug their devices.Amid the backlash, both Apple and Google paused their own human review programs. For its part, Amazon began letting Alexa users exclude their voice recordings from manual review and changed its privacy policies to include an explanation that humans may listen to their recordings.Reports by the Information and the Intercept technology websites in the last year examined the human role in training the software behind security cameras built by Ring. The sites reported that employees used clips customers had shared through a Ring app to train computer vision algorithms, and, in some cases, shared unencrypted customer videos with each other.Amazon doesn’t tell customers much about its troubleshooting process for Cloud Cam. In its terms and conditions, the company reserves the right to process images, audio and video captured by devices to improve its products and services.In a Q&A about Cloud Cam on its website, Amazon says “only you or people you have shared your account information with can view your clips, unless you choose to submit a clip to us directly for troubleshooting. Customers can also choose to share clips via email or social media.”The Cloud Cam teams in India and Romania don’t know how the company selects clips to be annotated, according to three of the people, but they said there were no obvious technical glitches in the footage that would require submitting it for troubleshooting purposes.At an industry event this week, David Limp, who runs Amazon’s Alexa and hardware teams, acknowledged that the company could have been more forthcoming about using people to audit AI. “If I could go back in time, that would be the thing I would do better,” he said. “I would have been more transparent about why and when we are using human annotation.”To contact the authors of this story: Natalia Drozdiak in Brussels at ndrozdiak1@bloomberg.netGiles Turner in London at gturner35@bloomberg.netMatt Day in Seattle at mday63@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Robin Ajello at rajello@bloomberg.net, Mark MilianFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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