Apple Inc.’s stock closed at a new high for the first time since January, marking the company’s seventh trading day of advances. Apple’s shares AAPL, +1.80% increased 1.8 percent to $144.57 on Wednesday, topping its previous high of $143.16 set on Jan. 26. To break Apple’s intraday record set on January 25, the stock must trade over $145.09.
Apple’s stock rose for the seventh day in a row, marking the company’s longest winning streak in nearly three months. The stock has gained 8.6% in the last seven sessions. Several analysts have recently weighed in on Apple’s prospects, including Samik Chatterjee of J.P. Morgan, who wrote Tuesday that the stock had “a very appealing set up for the second half of the year.” With a multiyear 5G tailwind to the replacement rate and a larger installed base supporting greater run-rate of annual volumes relative to current market estimates, Chatterjee believes Apple will be able to beat “quite low investor expectations” with its iPhone 13 launch in the fall. He upgraded the stock to overweight from underweight and boosted his price target to $170 from $165. According to Amit Daryanani of Evercore ISI, Apple’s App Store growth surged in June to over 23 percent, up from 13 percent in May and 18 percent in April. Given his estimates of the entire quarter’s performance and difficult comparisons to the early days of the pandemic a year ago, he believes consensus estimates for the App Store’s June-quarter revenue are a little too high, but he remains confident in Apple’s ability to grow the services business at a high-teens rate over the long term. With a $175 price target, he rates the stock as outperform. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.30 percent has up 13.3 percent this year, while Apple shares have gained 9.0 percent./n
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