FORTUNE — Gotta love these technical analysts.
As William Meade pointed out in Saturday’s ETF Daily News post, he never once mentioned Apple’s (AAPL) fundamentals during the three months that he was advising his readers — mostly hedge fund managers — to sell sell sell.
Now the president of Pure Alpha Research (and former research director at Zacks in Chicago) has changed his tune.
Why? He cites two reasons.
One is the pattern he sees forming in the chart above, a so-called Inverse Head and Shoulders:
“It is probably the most common technical analysis pattern in trading,” he explains. “An Inverse Head and Shoulders pattern is an extremely bullish reversal pattern, it occurs when a stock forms a bottom by printing a series of 3 lows. What’s important about this pattern is volume. Volume must be heavy on the lowest low, because that signals a wash out and exhaustion in selling, where are the sellers have sold their position, and this is exactly what has occurred in Apple’s stock.”
But the pattern is not the only reason for Meade’s about face. The other — the “catalyst” as he puts it — is that Tim Cook is coming to Washington this week to testify before a Senate subcomittee about the possible repatriation of $102 billion Apple is holding in overseas accounts.
“This is a sign of leadership [that the] major hedge funds have been waiting for,” he writes. “Big funds like to bet on sure things, and the reason they have not been buying Apple recently is the uncertainty over Apple’s offshore cash hoard. Now that this issue is coming to the forefront… the cloud of uncertainty will start to disappear.”
This time, Meade does give a nod to Apple’s fundamentals. “Everyone knows,” he says in an aside, “they have the best balance sheet in the world [and] a great dividend that’s higher than the 10 year treasury and growing.”
