Last week, Apple hit $900 billion in market cap, but it did not cheer up dividend investors as the stock slipped one spot on the most watched stocks list.
Apple got some negative publicity last week as a researcher in Vietnam hacked into Apple’s face recognition software. Apple, however, defended its phone by telling journalists that the face recognition software has a much lower probability of getting hacked (one in a million) than the fingerprint scanner on some of their older models (one in 50,000).’
The stock price has hardly suffered because of this. Apple hit $900 billion in market cap last week and is set to hit a mind-numbing market cap of $1 trillion. This looks quite possible given that the stock is trading at a P/E of 18.5 based on trailing 12 months earnings. This is considerably lower than that of the overall market and some of its competitors like Google (GOOG) that trades at 33 times earnings.
Dividend investors looking for a healthy yield are feeling the pain of Apple’s stock price run up. Apple yields a measly 1.48%, which is lower than some of the other technology giants like AT&T (T ) and Verizon (VZ ) that yield three times more than Apple. Apple’s annualized dividend growth for the last three years has been slightly less than 10%, which helps the yield, but is overpowered by stock price gains that are far more than 10% every year.
Other stocks that saw movement last week were auto giant General Motors, which moved down a gear from 80th to 81st rank, and drug giant Glaxo, which climbed two spots on the list.
Our Most Watched Stocks List is a user-generated, interest-based ranking of dividend-paying stocks, giving you a real-time snapshot of buying interest in the market. Generated by our Premium members’ watchlists, it’s aggregated and ranked by the most watched criteria.
The list has been designed to help income investors navigate the top dividend stocks being tracked by one of the world’s most advanced investing communities.
