Apple’s stock surges to its highest price ever amid growing optimism over iPhone 8

Apple is breaking records—the company’s stock price has surged to an all-time intraday high, trading as high as $134.88 today and having surpassed the previous all-time intraday high of $134.54 set on April 28, 2015. The current stock price gives the Cupertino company a market capitalization of nearly $710 billion, the largest market valuation for a publicly traded American company.

According to MarketWatch, just yesterday the stock had closed at a record $133.00, passing the previous record set two years earlier.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Apple, indeed!

Apple is now the world’s most valuable company by a sizable margin, beating Google’s parent company Alphabet ($575 billion), Microsoft ($500 billion) and Berkshire Hathaway ($412 billion). The stock has soared approximately 43 percent over the past twelve months, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed 28 percent.

As long as the company continues to make huge profits, the stock price should keep climbing (it’s worth noting that Tim Cook & Co. bought back over a billion shares over the last few years).

The stock has risen more than nine percent since Apple reported its better-than-expected quarterly earnings that broke three straight quarters in which it reported an annual decline in revenue and iPhone sales. For what it’s worth, Apple continues to be an iPhone company as the handset contributes about two-thirds of its revenue.

The rise of $AAPL can be chalked up to a recent upbeat report from investment bank Goldman Sachs which recently raised its twelve-month stock price target from $133 to $150. Goldman Sachs believes that iPhone 8 will include a 3D sensing technology crucial to augmented reality, a feature they expect to become a “significant step-up in innovation” compared with the prior two iPhone cycles.

If I were an investor, I’d be leveraging the upcoming megacycle and the Tenth Anniversary iPhone to buy the stock before the new phone is released, then dump the shares and cash out.

Shares of Apple have hit the $119.95 mark in intraday trading—a 14-month high—back in January. For an even better comparison, the company’s stock price hit a 52-week low of $89.47 in May 2016.

Food for thought: when adjusted for a 7-for-1 split in June 2014, Apple’s stock is trading at about $942 and seems on track to pass the $1,000 milestone, at which point Apple will become the world’s first trillion dollar company by market capitalization.

Do you remember when $AAPL dipped below $100 and people said it would never bounce back?

Source: MarketWatch