It took a few days, but Apple’s blow-out quarterly earnings report — driven by strong iPhone and Mac sales and bolstered by the largest stock repurchase program in the history of capitalism — has finally made its way through Wall Street’s algorithms and into Apple’s share price.
The stock closed Thursday at $104.83, up 1.8% for the day, 7.2% for the week and 88% from April 2013, the cruelest month, when it dipped into the high 300s.
Speculators who bought a lot of calls in September 2012, when Apple was approaching an intraday high of $705.07 ($100.72 post-split), will never get their money back.
But investors who held on to their shares through the rout of 2012 and 2013 are back in the green.
Apple is now not only the world’s most valuable public company, but it has left the nearest contenders in the dust. The top four market caps:
- Apple: $617.9 billion
- Exxon: $401.4 billion
- Microsoft $371.0 billion
- Google $369.0 billion
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CORRECTION: An earlier version described Apple’s market cap as a “record.” $615 billion is still, as reader Kelvin points out, well shy of the nearly $660 billion market valuation Apple enjoyed in Sept. 2012, before Tim Cook bought back all those shares.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at coins2day.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.