Apple Shares Spike To Record High

The new year started off well for Apple, which saw its share price crossing the $300 mark for the first time on Thursday.

Shares in the company closed 2.3 percent higher to $300.35 at the end of the day.

On the first day of trading in 2020, Apple’s rise coincided with a broader advance on Wall Street following the Chinese central bank’s move to stimulate the country’s economy.

The advance also came as the company reached a deal with former HBO chief executive Richard Plepler to produce video content for Apple TV+, its new video streaming service.

The move into streaming video subscriptions has been a boon for investors, yielding robust gains and enthusiasm. Any concerns about iPhone demands lagging haven’t come to pass yet. Apple was up 86 percent in 2019 — their highest annual gain in a decade — after faltering and dropping more than 6 percent in 2018.

The S&P 500 rose about 29 percent last year.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said that Apple’s success as of late has challenged those who thought Apple’s growth story was a thing of the past. He said that Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, had defied skeptics and led the company through a new era amid Chinese struggles and lawsuits such as one with Qualcomm. Through those struggles, Apple managed to develop a new iPhone and work out deals with China that benefited the company, Ives said.

Ives said iPhone sales, particularly once the 5G iPhones are released later this year, will “open the floodgates” for upgrades.

Apple is still the most valuable publicly traded company in the U.S., with a market capitalization of $1.33 trillion. That beats out Microsoft’s $1.23 trillion.

Apple’s stock hit $200 in August of 2018, and shares have soared nearly tenfold since 2009.

However, in spite of the good news, some analysts predict that Apple shares will drop this year. According to them, the shares are over-valued by as much as $170. The reasoning is that many people are possibly overexcited about the company’s transition from an iPhone-dominated one to a software-as-services one.

Analysts predicted that, as the earnings reports come in throughout the year, the shares will start to drop.