Does Apple have $0 of treasury stock?
"Treasury stock is not really represented in the Balance Sheet as a ""Treasury stock"" line item in the assets.  Some companies will break out Treasury Shares as a line item in the ""Shareholders Equity"" heading of the balance sheet but Apple hides it in the ""Shares Issued and Outstanding"" counts under the ""Shareholders Equity"" heading.  As of the most recent Q2 2017 quarterly report There are 5,205,815,000 shares issued against 5,336,166,000 shares outstanding.  This indicates that Apple is retaining about 130,351,000 shares in treasury. On the Q1 10-Q you can see that Apple had 5,255,423,000 shares issued which indicates roughly 49mm shares were repurchased by the end of Q2.  You can roughly verify this by looking at page 18 of the Q2 filing in the summary of the share repurchase program.  Repurchased as part of an Accelerated Share Repurchase arrangement bleeds between quarters but from February 2017 through May 2017 there have been 17.5mm shares repurchased.  31mm shares were also repurchased on the open market in Q2.    The ""shares issued"" total is on a downward trend as part of Apple's share repurchase initiative that has been underway for the last couple of years."
You need to do a few things to analyze your results. First, look at the timing of the deposits, and try to confirm the return you state. If it's still as high as you think, can you attribute it to one lucky stock purchase?  I have an account that's up 863% from 1998 till 2013. Am I a genius? Hardly. That account, one of many, happened to have stocks that really outperformed, Apple among them.  If you are that good, a career change may be in order. Few are that good. Joe When you own a share, you also own a vote (in most cases). That vote is your means of controlling the assets and management of the company. If you had enough votes and wanted to trade a share for an iPhone or liquidate the company entirely, you could do it. The only thing that prevents you from doing that is that companies are not set up to handle the transaction that way. Stock holders are usually trying to buy investments, not iPhones. There are companies that have more cash in the bank than the market cap (total value) of their stock. They usually don't remain as public companies for long in that case. An investor or group of investors buy them up and split the cash. If you had enough shares of Apple, you could do that to; or, just trade one for an iPhone. This is a good example of why it's in the public interest to prevent companies like Apple and Google from both hoarding cash and using it to payback investors, rather than use it for R&amp;D and capital improvements. While the mechanism can be argued, we need a way to prevent this accumulation of wealth from sitting idle, or remain with a select few. "The psychology of investing is fascinating. I buy a stock that's out of favor at $10, and sell half at a 400% profit, $50/share. Then another half at $100, figuring you don't ever lose taking a profit. Now my Apple shares are over $500, but I only have 100. The $10 purchase was risky as Apple pre-iPod wasn't a company that was guaranteed to survive.  The only intelligent advice I can offer is to look at your holdings frequently, and ask, ""would I buy this stock today given its fundamentals and price?"" If you wouldn't buy it, you shouldn't hold it. (This is in contrast to the company ratings you see of buy, hold, sell. If I should hold it, but you shouldn't buy it to hold, that makes no sense to me.) Disclaimer - I am old and have decided stock picking is tough. Most of our retirement accounts are indexed to the S&P. Maybe 10% is in individual stocks. The amount my stocks lag the index is less than my friends spend going to Vegas, so I'm happy with the results. Most people would be far better off indexing than picking stocks." I'm not sure it is the best idea, but you can buy only 4 stocks generally.  As you alluded to, you should take notice of the fees.  Also note that many stocks trade at significantly lower prices than Apple's per shares, so you might want to factor that into your decision.  You could probably get a better feel for transactions if you bought say 50 shares of a $30 stock; then it might be easier to see what it's like to sell some, etc. Note that specific trading sites might have various limits in place that would pose as barriers to this sort of behavior though. Take a look at apple.  It has no debt.  So the ev is basically mkt cap - cash.  Also remember market cap is the float * share price nothing else.  Obviously share price takes into account the assets of the firm into perpituituy but the way you phrased it, adding debt , didnt sound quite right to me.  We remove cash since someone buying a company isn't going to pay for your cash.  In the transaction cash is distributed to share holders then the company is sold. I was thinking that the value of the stock is the value of the stock...the actual number of shares really doesn't matter, but I'm not sure. You're correct.  Share price is meaningless.   Google is $700 per share, Apple is $100 per share, that doesn't say anything about either company and/or whether or not one is a better investment over the other. You should not evaluate an investment decision on price of a share.  Look at the books decide if the company is worth owning, then decide if it's worth owning at it's current price. "Expanding like crazy compared to what?  Apple?  You mean the company that has maintained a 25% operating margin while growing top line by 160% since 2010?   No company has EVER had a market cap of $1T, let alone maintained it.  What is your point?  All you're talking about is relative price and ""history"" which has little to no bearing on what is going to happen in the future.  I see no indication of any argument related to the actual valuation of Apple stock.  It is still, at $650B, pretty reasonably valued considering the facts, e.g., ability to generate cash, maintain margins, grow revenues, and for management to make sound financial moves, i.e., return $ to shareholders.        You come off extremely condescending yet you seem not to have much of an understanding in regards to what dictates stock price over the long term." This is something I love about only investing in tech. Every company I'd want to invest in has a great balance sheet anyway, that's just how their economics work, so I don't have to worry about this. I actually work in reverse. Like with AAPL, I'm deducting their cash from their market cap to get an even more attractive valuation*. As opposed to trying to work out all the complex debt and liabilities of a bank or something.  *AAPL actually does have some debt now but it's dead simple to deduct and only a workaround to their offshore cash. "&gt;It was a discussion about revenue recognition from the sales of iPhones, and whether it would be better for Apple if the regulation was changed to allow immediate recognition rather than deferring the income... My argument is that it didn't matter one bit, because nothing is changing about how the company is actually run. Cash flow in and out of the company doesn't change... The Accounting majors largely disagreed with me, while the Finance majors largely agreed.  There are too many ways to ""buy"" an iPhone. While some assumptions could be made to make revenue recognition more uniform, cash flow could be wildly different and isn't guaranteed based on the number of units sold. If everyone paid in full with cash, this wouldn't be the case. However, the large majority of iPhone owners acquire their phones via carrier subsidy with another major group buying them on payment plans either from their carrier or directly from Apple." I think it's safe to say that Apple cannot grow in value in the next 20 years as fast as it did in the prior 20. It rose 100 fold to a current 730B valuation. 73 trillion dollars is nearly half the value of all wealth in the world.  Unfortunately, for every Apple, there are dozens of small companies that don't survive. Long term it appears the smaller cap stocks should beat large ones over the very long term if only for the fact that large companies can't maintain that level of growth indefinitely.  A non-tech example - Coke has a 174B market cap with 46B in annual sales. A small beverage company can have $10M in sales, and grow those sales 20-25%/year for 2 decades before hitting even $1B in sales. When you have zero percent of the pie, it's possible to grow your business at a fast pace those first years. "&gt; StockTwits Chairman Howard Lindzon, who is long Apple stock, dismissed the IDC report, arguing that what matters is that the company's ""products are great, the stores are great, and new products are coming.""  What the what. Samsung has now 25% of the market, Huawei may very well reach 10% in mid 2015, if not sooner, yet their shares are up 20% since the beginning of the year.  I'm fond of Apple products, but I just can't see them resisting against State-backed Samsung for one or two more years. And the $9bn market for the iWatch is pure speculation." If a company doesn't take out loans to buy back the shares, is it still a bad move? I don't necessarily see the problem with companies retiring shares.  If the shares of say Apple have a P/E ratio of 10 and the price to book value max of 1. Wouldn't it be a smart move by the company and the share holders assuming the projected net revenue will hold for at least ten years if not increase.   I guess I don't know the true practice of buying back shares but at its core (could be more corrupt), I just don't see it as inherently bad. My point is that investors can assume whatever they want, it doesn't make it a fact. If I think Apple should be selling at 1,000 a share because the I assume the US government will pass a law giving them a huge tax advantage, does that mean that there is now a government subsidy in effect? Until the government explicitly states that they will not allow a systemically important bank to go the way of Lehman, there is no government subsidy. Alphabet has about 40% on shore or 60%.   I know it is 60/40 but forget which way.    So way, way more than they really need.  What Apple does is borrow against the offshore money when needed,   Apple now has over $90b in debt and Google less than $4b.   So Google would not have any problem.