Over the last year, Apple's share price has swung widely from $363.32 to $705.07.
Surely a more accurate statement would be that the share price has increased dramatically. Swung widely implies ups and downs.
The current dip is similar to one seen in April and its share price is still markedly up YoY.
AAPL currently has an implied volatility of 28.93%. The odds, quick-and-dirty Gaussian [1], of today's return happening by chance is less than 1%.
>"Apple's movement over the past three months has been an exaggerated version of the NASDAQ or the Dow"
Over the past three months (60 trading days) the historic ß has been 1.26. This would make the systemic portion of today's return -0.33%. Curiously, the historic ß for the past year (250 trading days) has been 0.94.
[1] Using a non-Gaussian alpha-stable or asymmetric generalised hyperbolic distro still implies this being a significant event not attributable to market noise (though there is some shadiness happening in the markets today with system's coming online after a non-standard detachment, e.g. KNX declaring self-help)
(I suppose Apple is not yet that big but it could happen someday. Maybe a popular stock having much more trades than others could have such impact?)
In Apple's case that peak coincided with the my hyped iPhone 5 launch which might explain some of the exaggeration.
There are many many people who understand the market better than I do but to me at least this is a complete non-story.