[NewsPoster]

Apple's stock closed at a new "all-time" high today, settling at $109.70 per share after an intra-day high of $109.75 -- breaking the record set just over a week ago. The company, now valued at $643.37 billion -- more than a third more than the next most valuable publicly-traded company -- may be within sight of besting its own split- and buyback-adjusted all-time high and market capitalization records, which would currently be around $113.86 per share and $667.77 billion, respectively.

The calculation for the true "all time" high consists of dividing the all-time high market cap, which is unaffected by splits, by the number of currently-outstanding shares. Because of Apple's aggressive stock-buyback program, even the seven-to-one split of shares that happened last June has not stopped the overall total of outstanding shares from going down to its lowest level in at least a decade.

Thus, while current AAPL prices routinely reach "all-time highs" on a simple split-adjusted basis (highest pre-June stock price divided by seven), to beat both the share price and market cap, the stock needs to reach higher still. Indeed, the target price may climb higher, depending on the amount of stock Apple may have bought and retired since October 21, when the last buyback results were released.

Today's high comes as AAPL has been on a fairly steady upward rise since April 23, when the stock bounced from just under $75 per share to just under $85 in just two days, the result of much better-than-expected quarterly results announcements. Recent news of higher-than-expected demand for the iPhone 6 Plus -- Apple's most profitable model -- and the rolling launch of its enterprise partnership with IBM is expected to continue to keep the stock on a generally upward path. So far, AAPL is up 36.88 percent for the year to date, and well above most analysts' predictions for year-end price targets.

Apple's current market cap of $643.37 puts it some $235 billion higher than the next-highest US publicly-traded company, Exxon Mobil. Microsoft and Google (respectively) have the third- and fourth-highest market cap, respectively, with investment group Berkshire Hathaway rounding out the top five. The Nasdaq index had a good day generally on Tuesday, closing up nearly nine points.

[jdonahoe]

A more interesting price would be $113.67. This would give Apple a market cap of $666.66 billion.

Just saying...

[DiabloConQueso]

Hey, just like the price of the first Apple computer (divided by 1,000,000,000, of course).

[malax]

This article just confuses things by mentioned the contrived notion of a split-adjusted and buy-back-adjusted share price. Split-adjusted is necessary and makes good sense; buy-back-adjusted is pointless. Market cap is somewhat interesting in that it's the (theoretical) value of all the shares at the current market price. Obviously market cap accounts for the fact that there are fewer shares now that Apple bought back a bunch in recent years. But there is no point in adjusting the share-price to "account for" the buyback. That's already factored in to the price, and as an investor holding shares I don't need to adjust for the buyback to understand my investment. I had x shares before the recent buy back and now I have 7x shares. And the value of those shares is higher than they have ever been. In other words, if at any time in the history of Apple, you bought shares and held them, they are worth more now than ever before. That's what an all-time high is, and we're there now.