You won’t find a bigger stock than Apple, as its market capitalization rose to nearly $3 trillion in early 2022. Yet even as other stocks make their push toward trillion-dollar market-cap status, Apple is dealing with a headwind in its efforts to retrace its record run — and it has only itself to blame…
With the stock now about 2% below that mark, it might seem as if breaching $3 trillion once again would be inevitable. Yet that isn’t the case. In order to reach a $3 trillion market cap, Apple stock would have to climb to nearly $190 per share. That’s not a huge move, but it’s still more than 6% above the $179 price.
The reason for this is that Apple has consistently repurchased shares. As of April 1, the company had about 15.79 billion shares outstanding. That was down from the 16.39 billion shares outstanding as of Dec. 25, 2021, immediately before the record run to $3 trillion. Those 600 million shares represented tens of billions of dollars of stock buybacks that Apple has made in just the past 15 months.
