Bank of America Merrill Lynch today raised its Apple price target from $230 to $250, a 16% increase, and reiterated the firm’s “Buy” rating.
In a note to clients, BofAML analyst Wamsi Mohan cited the strong rate of growth in non-gaming apps, which offers “increased confidence in the sustainability of strong App Store sales.”
Mohan raised his 2019 revenue estimate for Apple Services by $800 million, factoring in slightly higher margins.
MacDailyNews Note: In premarket trading, shares of Apple are curently up over a dollar or about 0.50%.
The premarket bump did not hold. AAPL now is selling off, about 0.5% down in heavy trading. Unless this reverses, the market will be up two days while AAPL is down.
you might want to check again………..
Now in the last hour of trading all the gains for the day have been wiped out. We’ll see how it ends up at the close.
Didn’t BofAML get the memo? Apple will be nearly out of business by this time next year? /s
(Well, at least according to one analyst who likely does not have even two functioning brain cells.)
$250?! How soon? By the end of the year? That seems a bit too high to me. I can’t imagine most of the analysts agreeing with that number. In fact, nearly half the analysts have target prices lower than Apple is trading now. Apple is not a company that analysts are all in agreement with. With such a wide variance of target prices, there must be something quite unsettling about Apple that make many analysts unsure of Apple’s value.
Anyway, I’m satisfied with Apple’s share price for the time being as it has certainly exceeded my expectations for this time of the year. I thought the stock was going to go into another funk while the rest of the market soared.
On the first trading day of this year, AAPL closed at $172.26. Yesterday (Monday), backing down from its 22nd “all-time” closing high of the year (Friday), AAPL closed at just a hair over a 25% share-price increase (since January). Today, AAPL was also down a bit, closing at just a hair under a 25% increase, but still well above its 21st “all-time” closing high. Should AAPL reach a share price of $250 on Dec. 31 of this year (as unlikely as that might seem) it would represent a 45% increase since Jan. 1, 2018. That is actually in line with its 48% share-price increase in 2017. Because of two “flat” years, APPL’s most recent three-year and five-year average share price increases (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31) are both in the 18% range. This does not include dividend payments, which averaged $0.697 per share so far this calendar year. (AAPL’s fiscal year is different from the calendar year.)
There’s something about 2:00pm relating to AAPL. Nearly every time the stock goes down the dumper it begins at 2:00pm. I can’t put my finger on the reason but it’s happened more times over the years than I can remember.