EARLIER this year, there was plenty of speculation that Apple’s stock had entered bubble territory. Investors apparently think otherwise: on August 20th the firm’s share price hit $665, giving it a market capitalisation of more than $623 billion—and making it the most valuable listed company of all time. This record was previously held by another tech behemoth, Microsoft, whose market capitalisation reached $616 billion in December 1999. Although in real terms Microsoft still holds the crown (in today’s dollars, its record market capitalisation would be around $850 billion), no other technology company has ever carried as much weight as Apple currently does in the global equity markets: it accounts for 4.8% of the S&P 500, 3.7% of America’s stockmarket and 1.3% of the global equity market. Some bank analysts have started to report America’s corporate earnings without Apple, because the firm's inclusion skews results. Bulls reckon that the price could go even higher—and that Apple could become the world’s first public company with a trillion-dollar market capitalisation.
