Avoid buying AAPL now; prefer waiting for a pullback after the recent rally.

Let's focus in on Apple's chart as this has been, you know, one of the more fascinating uh stories not only over the last 24 hours, but I will argue going back to late April as it's almost been the counter to the AI infrastructure trade.

This has been a company that has not committed uh to buying and investing to the same extent that many of its mega cap tech peers have. And sometimes on these days where you see the AI infrastructure trade under pressure, it's days like that where Apple is a bit more rewarded.

That said, new CEO John Turnis led his first product launch event yesterday. Today's reaction to that launch event is the focus of today's morning trade.

We've had almost 24 hours to digest things and it seems like this foldable phone has just dominated the headlines. It certainly is. I mean, I think it's exciting. It's there's an argument to be made that it's an entrance into a new product category.

It is still an iPhone. It's called the iPhone Duo, but obviously a new category in that it folds. It's not the traditional shape of an iPhone. It's hinged, although when it's opened, you can't really even tell.

I mean, it really it's welldesigned. Uh, it's their first foldable phone. It opens up into about a size of a passport. You can see it there on the screen. And it has a screen whether you have it folded open or whether you have it folded closed.

It has a front-facing screen. This is seemingly the the big exciting piece here coming out of this surprise and shine event.

But they did do a complete overhaul of the new 18 line, the 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max. They have a smaller dynamic island. They have a better camera here. They have a 48 megapixel fusion main camera.

They've got a lot more stops in terms of its ability to control depth of field and low light exposure. So, likely trying to combat some of those complaints that perhaps the camera isn't as good as some of the other devices.

Also has this new A20 chip uh in these new iPhone 18s. And there's this photo authenticity sensor that will allow you to tag that the photo was actually taken with an iPhone as opposed to being created by AI and that's embedded in the device if you want that.

In addition to uh that AI, there is now a full roll out of Siri AI and this iOS 27. Now it is running on a double powered 16 core neural engine. But the really big thing here is this personal context awareness.

It is going to use the data already in your Apple ecosystem to be personally aware of your needs, your desires, your content, what you keep on your phone or your Apple Watch. So that includes your health data to add for health and wellness tracking.

Something as simple as me looking for a gift card to a restaurant in my email. I can have it search my email, find me the gift card, and make me the reservation. So, we could potentially see a lot of um improvements there in terms of Apple's AI usage, although that's not really the conversation driver.

Right now, I did have someone make an argument to me yesterday that that should be the conversation driver.

The Apple Watch Series 12 though has this big focus on AI health with this expanded AI rollout. Uh there's a new casing. We also got an new AirPod iteration. It's iteration five now.

Uh they have more active noise cancellation in that base model. now it's included.

Um, and we did see price increases though in the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max of $100 each, but the watch and the AirPods did maintain their pricing.

City keeping a buy rating, $365 price target. They love this foldable phone. They say it's their biggest new hardware category since the AirPods.

But I mentioned that pricing. Let's talk about JP Morgan. They say they're largely in line with expectations. pricing was pretty much in line with the base case, but they think the numbers are below the larger increase that investors have been anticipating on the count of memory costs.

They say they're walking a fine balance of absorbing those costs while keeping an opportunity for a positive cycle. They keep an overweight rating.

BFA though lowering their price target to 370 from 380 keeps a buy. Says that the showcase uh from John Turnis was positive. Pricing came in lower than they expected. They are think it's going to drive higher units but put some pressure on margins.

Rose and Blat, similar sentiment here. They said the light touch on pricing could weigh on its gross margins, of course, because of memory costs. Jeffre uh really likes the foldable phone.

They liked that there was a cheaper version at that 256 gig option. Thought that helped to improve affordability, but also highlighted that they're protecting volume at the expense of margin.

So, some margin concerns because the pricing increases weren't as high as thought.

Yeah. Uh and I got to be honest, that that product certainly made a splash in terms of catching attention. I was just having friends, you know, bringing it up. I can't remember the last time an Apple launch did that.

Uh despite the success of the Apple Watch and the AirPods over the years,

I want to get your thoughts on Apple as a tradable product as this stock has seemingly broke correlation with many of its megga tech peers. Yeah, you nailed it. It doesn't have the same uh infrastructure.

It doesn't have the same footprint. It doesn't have the same spend bottom line on all this AI trade. They're just going to be banking on all of the money that uh Open AI and all the money that Anthropic and Google is spending on AI is going to filter into their ecosystem.

And I think that's a good bet. They're hoping that they're the wearable product that people will use this AI for. And I think maybe that is exactly what people are excited about this uh launch.

Yes. Uh it is a kind of a cool thing, this foldable phone. I'm not so sure people are going to jump out and spend $2,000 for it. Maybe kind of looks like a tablet to me. Uh having said that, uh yeah, definitely cool.

Definitely really neat advancement and excited to see where that goes.

Big bucking of the trend today though. The market's broadly down. Apple's higher. Uh so for me this is kind of a like a big move up for Apple. Not something I like to do going after and chasing stocks when they're uh in a big rally mode.

And just looking at the overall market is a tough environment right now. We do have high oil prices. We do have high inflation. The market uh off of its lows this morning. But definitely uh September seasonally a weak time of the year.

I'd just be looking and saying, "Hey, had a nice little run up here. If there is a pullback, I wouldn't want to be jumping in and buying it right here.

I'd look at uh the September just expiring in eight days here. 310 put $25 to collect here. Almost uh almost a 4% protection to the downside here if it do we do see a correction in Apple uh over the next week.

And if it does pull back, I'll be happy to buy it down a 310. If not, get to collect 205 here for just a week on a $320 stock. That's a really nice uh yield for a week's worth of uh work.