FORTUNE — Tuesday was another strange one for Apple’s (AAPL) beleagued shares.
With the caveat that it’s always dangerous to attribute reason to something as irrational as the stock market, this is how it looked to me:
- The stock opened strong — despite a wishy-washy Goldman Sachs note and a bizarre Jim Cramer rant — on news that Tim Cook’s apology to China seemed to have done the trick .
- Then, around 1:30 p.m., something simultaneously goosed the volume and killed the buzz. My candidate: A story in the Wall Street Journal that said Apple had begun production on a new iPhone 5-size phone for delivery this summer.
Analysts have been been talking about this phone for weeks. Heck, they’ve already nicknamed it: the iPhone 5S. But there’s something about a headline in the Journal that has the power to move the market, even if it doesn’t manage move the story forward.
The stock ended where it started, at $429.79, up $0.88 (0.21%) for the day.