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Shares of Apple (AAPL) are weaker than the overall market this morning, falling $14.15, or 2.6%, to $531.93 compared to the 1.4% drop in the Nasdaq Composite Index.

One rumor making the rounds this morning is that funds may be trimming their position in Apple in order to prepare to re-weight their index representation to accomodate Facebook, which will at some point be added to indices after it goes public tomorrow morning.

Some of this thinking may be prompted by negative remarks from hedge funds, although the hedge fund view is hardly monolithic.

Bloomberg's Adam Satariano this morning writes that Apple shares have "lost favor" with some hedge funds, including SAC Capital and Viking Global.

However, as my colleague Avi Salzmanreported here last night, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital offered a spirited defense of Apple yesterday at the Ira Sohn investment conference in New York. As I noted on Tuesday, Greenlight kept all its Apple shares last quarter.

But the thought apparently floating behind some of this is that Facebook may prompt funds in general to trim Apple positions, and some funds might even take some profits on Apple stock to raise money if they need it, to buy their Facebook shares.

James Kelleher with Argus Research, who rates Apple shares a Buy with a $670 price target, is skeptical of the Facebook angle.

He acknowledges that at some point, Facebook may become part of the MSCI, for example, perhaps making up 1%, similar to Intel (INTC), which has a $132 billion market cap, just above what Facebook could fetch in the market after its offering.

With Apple representing perhaps 4% of the MSCI, he notes, one could conceivably trim some Apple stock to accommodate the addition of Facebook.

Kelleher knows of at least one large institutional client that has an allocation put in for Facebook shares.

However, that client is not mentioning Apple at all, he tells me, and the client is aware that index committees take quite some time to add a stock to an index, so there's no reason to rush.

He has heard of other, smaller funds that might actually need to raise cash to buy Facebook, and so it's conceivable those parties might need to take profits on Apple to do so.

But, asks Kelleher, "Why would Apple be the one you'd want to sell?" after a $100 drop from $640 per share?

Why not, he suggests, rather sell materials stocks, such as Alcoa (AA), given that the stronger U.S. dollar means it's not a great time to own materials?

Rather than Facebook, Kelleher thinks today's softness might stem from another bout of iPhone jitters -- investors worrying about this quarter's and next quarter's unit shipments in advance of the next model.

"I think the selling in Apple is related to a little iPhone exhaustion," says Kelleher.

"The follow-on quarter for the iPhone 4S [fiscal Q2 ended in March], wasn't as weak as some people expected, and so investors may be thinking this one [fiscal Q3] is going to be the weak quarter."

Kelleher notes that with increased awareness of 4G cellular networks, and with increasing numbers of 4G phones out there, some buyers may wait to see if and when Apple will offer a 4G phone. By that, he is referring specifically to 4G based on the "long term evolution," or LTE, cellular standard.

The iPhone 4S does not support LTE, but the conventional wisdom at this point is that the iPhone 5 this fall will be that phone.

Update: In a phone call this afternoon, Colin Gillis of BGC Capital says of the prospect of some profit-taking to buy Facebook, "It's not crazy, Apple is the largest potential source of cash out there for a lot of these firms. It's a big old pile of cash."

As concerns the iPhone, he says "People are concerned about the June quarter, they're realizing we're going to have a sequential slowdown in iPhone, there are 8.6 million units in the channel, the largest sequential increase ever, the largest absolute number of phones in the channel" and "there's already some iPhone fatigue happening."

However, it will be "interesting," adds Gillis, to see what happens with Apple after Facebook prices.

Apple shares ended the day down $15.96, or 3%, at $530.12.

Correction: a prior version of this post referenced comments by Kelleher regarding a weaker U.S. dollar, when in fact it should have mentioned the rising dollar against the Euro. My apology for any confusion caused by the error.