Apple (AAPL). What a beast.
The stock is back near its highest price ever. With one trading day left in October, it’s heading toward its highest monthly finish yet.
The whole company is worth about $5.1 trillion. That’s the price investors put on all its shares combined.
And it’s right there in the race to become the most valuable public company in the world again.
But the part that interests me most isn’t the race for first place.
It’s what Apple actually sells. And who buys it.
We call Apple a technology company. That’s where it sits in the stock market’s filing cabinet.
Fine.
But when someone walks into an Apple store and buys a new phone, who is that?
A consumer.
When they buy headphones, a watch, or more space for the 14,000 pictures they refuse to delete?
Also a consumer.
You can call it technology. I see people spending money.
And I think that’s the part that might matter the most.
Who’s Buying All Those iPhones?
My friend Jeff Macke always gets me thinking about this.
Jeff is my guy when it comes to stores, shoppers, and where people spend their money. He’s a friend, but he’s also someone whose work I admire and whose judgment I value.
His point about Apple is pretty simple: Everybody uses technology. That doesn’t tell us much about who the customer is.
Apple sells consumer electronics.
Come on. What are we talking about here?
There’s a person on the other end of that sale. Someone choosing a new phone. Someone buying a gift. Someone paying each month for music, movies, or a place to keep all those pictures.
Entertainment. Information. More noise, depending on how you use the thing.
Either way, there’s a customer paying for it.
So when I hear that the consumer is broke, and then I look at Apple’s stock, I have questions.
How does this fit into that story?
A rising stock price isn’t a count of how many phones sold this morning. It reflects what investors expect the business to earn in the future.
But that’s useful information!
Investors are putting a roughly $5 trillion price tag on a business built around devices and services that people choose to buy.
That doesn’t tell me every family is doing great. It does make me question a story where nobody has money and nobody is spending.
Apple deserves a seat at that discussion.
A pretty big seat.
Your Best Player Is Putting Up Points
Now let’s bring this back to the stock market.
Apple makes up 13.6% of XLK, the big ETF that holds technology stocks in the S&P 500. Call it about $14 out of every $100 in that fund. Only Nvidia (NVDA) had a bigger share.
That’s a lot of Apple. And its reach goes beyond one technology fund.
Apple is part of the major market indexes, the baskets of stocks we use to track how the market is doing.
People own a piece of Apple through a retirement fund without ever buying a share on their own.
When Apple rises, it helps lift those baskets. The bigger the company’s share of the basket, the more its moves matter.
This is why I keep coming back to sports.
Your best player is putting up a bunch of points.
Is that bad for your team?
I’m having a hard time making that argument.
It doesn’t promise a win. You still want the other players to contribute. But I’d sure rather have one of my biggest scorers making shots.
That’s how I think about Apple.
There’s the consumer side: a business built around things people want to buy.
Then there’s the market side: a giant stock whose gains can help a whole lot of investors.
Both stand out to me.
And that’s really why I’m writing this.
I’ve been writing about markets for almost 20 years. Day after day, all I can do is tell you what I’m seeing, what I’m thinking about, and why I think it matters.
You can’t fake that forever. It has to come naturally.
Some days, I’ll spend time on something that turns out to matter less than I thought. I’ve done that before. I’ll do it again.
You might read this and think, “JC, that’s a dumb thing to focus on.”
Fair enough. We can disagree.
But when I look at this market today, Apple stands out.
One of the biggest companies on the planet, selling things to consumers, with its stock near the highest price anyone has ever paid for it.
I think that’s a powerful force for the market.
And I’m having a hard time seeing it as a bad thing.