- Apple hit a market cap of $2 trillion, doubling in valuation in just over two years.
- It’s the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market cap.
- Apple was also the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market cap.
Apple hit a market cap of $2 trillion Wednesday, doubling in valuation in just over two years to become the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach the milestone.
Based on a share count of more than 4.275 billion, Apple broke the barrier just before 11 a.m. ET, when its price rose to $467.77. However, Apple fell below the $2 trillion mark as the day moved on, and shares closed at $462.83, giving it a market cap of about $1.98 trillion.
Apple first reached a $1 trillion market cap on Aug. 2, 2018. Wall Street has largely expected the iPhone maker to become the first to surpass $2 trillion. On July 31, Apple passed the state oil giant Saudi Aramco to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/apple-reaches-2-trillion-market-cap.html
Five hundred companies make up Wall Street’s most widely used measure of the stock market’s performance: the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. If it were not for just six of them, the benchmark would be down this year.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that thanks to these six highflying stocks – including Apple, which on Wednesday became the first company to be valued at $2 trillion – the S&P 500 has powered through the coronavirus pandemic to gain almost 5 percent and set a record.
Along with Apple, the overachievers – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Google’s parent, Alphabet – are household names that have leveraged digital expertise to prosper amid the new, socially distanced reality. Through Tuesday, these six stocks collectively were up more than 43 percent this year, while the rest of the companies in the index together lost about 4 percent.
“These are sound companies that have been able to grow their earnings,” Ed Yardeni, a prominent investment strategist with Yardeni Research, said of the big tech stocks. “They’ve benefited from delivering goods and services in the pandemic. These are the companies at the very epicenter of booming demand.”
www.thehour.com/business/article/Rising-stock-market-would-be-in-the-red-without-a-15496648.php