Apparently Apple had some sort of news this week, and I guess the Federal Reserve is supposed to do something next week, eh?

Well, there are thousands of market pundits who will tell you all about those things — and dozens who will tell you that the world is going to start coming to an end after the Fed raises rates next week (if they do indeed raise short-term rates, which, according to economists, is now a 50/50 proposition).

So I won’t bore you with long screeds about the state of the economy or the headline news, but… my short take on those two items? Apple is going to have a phenomenal sales year with the iPhone, probably breaking the record set last year, and they’ll sell a ton of iPhones in China despite the fact that everyone is convinced China’s economy is going to disappear. And it will happen faster, since China’s getting the phone at the same time as the US, which didn’t used to happen. China’s stock market is a disaster, and the infrastructure-led economy is faltering, but the emerging consumer economy is still growing fast and there are soooooo many consumers that the iPhone, which is a middle class status symbol in China (and India and elsewhere) the way it used to be in the US just a few years ago (before nearly everyone had one), will sell just fine, I expect. Slowing growth does not mean a country is in depression, or that people stop buying stuff. I would be inclined to buy more Apple (AAPL) here, since it’s so clearly cheap even if it doesn’t grow very much… but I also have committed to my Stop Loss strategy test for this year so I’m letting the shares that I stopped out of in AAPL (half my position) stay stopped out until I have a much more specific reason to buy more, like an embarrassingly cheap valuation instead of just a cheap one (or a “buy back in” signal from TradeStops, though that wouldn’t come unless the stock gets dramatically higher).

And the Fed can raise rates whenever they want to… it may cause some jumpiness, particularly in income investments like REITs, MLPs and high yield stocks, which are all already down sharply (partly in anticipation of the Fed), and in the banking and financial stocks whose business revolves around ...