Apple $425, Nasdaq 11,000 – Yipee!!!
As you can see on the chart, AAPL is up almost 40% for the year and AAPL is 15% of the Nasdaq so it’s responsible for 6% of the Nasdaq’s rise from 9,000 to 11,000 (22%) for the year so 27% of the Nasdaq’s rise is due to one stock and then you have to consider the suppliers Apple boosts along with their own stock.
Apple is having a break-out moment as $425 per share is a $1.8Tn market cap so we’re just 10% away from $2Tn in valuation at $470 – get your party hats ready. $2Tn is the GDP of Italy (#9 in the World) or Brazil (#8) with France, India and the UK, with population of 65M in France, 1.4Bn in India and 67M in the UK doing a piss-poor job comared to Apple’s 137,000 employees. Is the average Apple employee 10,000 times more productive than the average Indian? If so, it’s hard to explain the valuation of Infosys (INFY).
Speaking of companies that are worth $1.5 Trillion (yes, there’s more than one now), Microsoft (MSFT) is trying to buy TikTok’s North American operations so they can have something cool in their portfolio (now that’s they’ve given up on Bing). President Trump has been helping Microsoft by threatening to ban TikTok in the US, devaluing their platform and scaring the company enough for MSFT to swoop in and make an offer – good old-fashioned strong arm tactics from your favorite Oiligopolists:
“Microsoft appreciates the U.S. Government’s and President Trump’s personal involvement as it continues to develop strong security protections for the country,” the company said in its statement.
The deal would land Microsoft the breakout social-media player of this decade. It would give Washington a win over Beijing by bringing a Chinese technology crown jewel under U.S. ownership. For TikTok parent ByteDance it would resolve the national-security concerns that threatened to thwart its U.S. operations. The proposed transaction gained the blessing of senior Trump officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who saw value in an American company getting access to sophisticated TikTok algorithms that decide what videos users are…
