This was expected, since the price of stocks tends to get "pinned" to expiring options, which expired today. I was talking to one of my friends about AAPL being pinned at $500 yesterday.<p>The closest strike price for options expiring today, with the highest open interest, was the 500 strike price. If I remember correctly, there were 30k+ contracts at this price. On Thursday night, those options were priced at around $4.95, or $495 per contract.<p>There was a great deal of incentive for market makers to pin the price of AAPL at $500, rendering all those options worthless.<p>Looks like it worked.
More: <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/1002601-buy-apple-on-january-18" rel="nofollow">http://seekingalpha.com/article/1002601-buy-apple-on-january...</a><p>> But now, however, the gains of the Summer have come back in and Apple's share price has only to stay flat for the next two months for all those call options to expire worthless. The institutional money managers that wrote those options, if they were to try to manipulate Apple's share price, have a lot of incentive to keep Apple in place for a short time, then drive it higher:<p>> Apple is getting a lot of buzz for being undervalued here, but there is an enormous amount of pressure on the price at these levels that will be lifted after options expiration. If you like Apple, consider having some patience here and making a buy at the end of the day on Friday, January 18th, 2013.
This is on Hacker News why?<p>Daily stock market quotes are like comments or articles on gossip blogs - it's the opinion of ~0.001% of the market for ~1 second - and the opinion that they give is usually wrong.
1) Of course stock prices suffer manipulation.<p>2) The braying about banker manipulation is necessarily louder here because AAPL is beyond popular with retail investors. Look at just about any charting/analysis site, it has been the most popular symbol on most days for years.
I got seriously pissed because a bunch of idiots got excited about the number 500 and Apple, so this will probably be my last comment on this thread.<p>Anyway, let me tell you this: I work for a (fairly) big 'global macro' hedge fund. Historically we traded fx and rates, but we started (slowly) trading equity last year. The rationale given to our investors was: "the equity market is full of arbitrage opportunities because it is very much a retail market and people tend to trade out of 'gut feelings'.<p>We are not manipulating the market. You are, and we are profiting from it. Suckers.
This is all tracked very well over at <a href="http://aaplpain.com/?page_id=8" rel="nofollow">http://aaplpain.com/?page_id=8</a> for those interested in the options market around AAPL.