Apple's stock continues to fade. It's down another 1.5% today.

Part of the story here is well known: Steve Jobs is gone, there's no big blockbuster product on the horizon, and Android is a real threat to the iPhone.

But there's a bigger story that's related to the overall market.

Mark Dow tweeted this great chart comparing Apple to the gold miners over the last year.

Says Dow: Not saying that $GDX (blue line) and $AAPL are similar behavioral phenomena...well, actually, I am.

We wrote about something similar a couple of weeks ago.

For years during the crisis, Apple was basically an asset class of its own (like gold). While other stocks were massively correlated, moving in tandem, Apple was ripping higher, divorced from market gravity.

But with the sun rising, and the crisis panic fading, markets have become less correlated. And suddenly there's less demand for a unique asset that's shown itself to be untethered from everything else.

So just as there's less need for gold in a world where there's more optimism and less panic, so too is there less need to own Apple.

And so in addition to all of the product stuff, the Apple decline is also about macro-economics and the end of the panic.

Now Watch: How Tim Cook Rose To Become The CEO Of Apple



