Apple Stock Is on Its Hottest Winning Streak Since 2003. What Happens Next.

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Apple stock hasn’t had a winning streak this hot since spring 2003.

Shares in

Apple

(ticker: AAPL) have climbed in every single trading session since March 14, when the stock bottomed out below $151, down more than 15% year to date at that point.

The rally brought shares up to $175.60 as of Monday’s close. The iPhone maker and tech giant has outperformed the wider market and peers in Big Tech, roaring higher after being beaten down since January amid an environment of rising interest rates and global uncertainty due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

Apple stock was 0.7% higher in U.S. premarket trading on Tuesday, set to notch 11 straight days of gains. 

The rally has moved the shares 17% higher from their bottom and added more than $400 billion to the company’s market capitalization—that is about one

Walmart

(WMT), two

Wells Fargo

s (WFC), or three

PayPal

s (PYPL). With a market cap now nearing $2.9 trillion, the elusive $3 trillion valuation is back in sight.

By comparison, the

Dow Jones Industrial Average
has gained 6% over the same period. The

S&P 500
is up nearly 10% and the tech-heavy

Nasdaq Composite
has climbed 14%. Apple has beaten out shares in fellow tech giants

Alphabet

(GOOGL) and

Microsoft

(MSFT), which have both gained about 12% since March 14.

The last time Apple stock recorded at least 11 consecutive days of gains was a period in late April and early May 2003, when the shares rose for 12 straight days in a rally that saw the company’s stock price jump by more than one-third.

Steve Jobs was still running Apple, and the only pandemic on people’s mind was SARS, which was in its final months. The world’s mobile phone leader was

Nokia

(NOK) and Apple’s latest innovation was launching the iTunes Store.

There are few clues to suggest how the newfound momentum will play out. After all, this is only the fourth time since 2002 that the stock has been up for 10 straight days.

“While the winning streak for Apple is great for shareholders, it appears to say little about the future performance of Apple’s stock,” said a team of analysts at Bespoke Investment Group in a note on Tuesday.

“Looking at where the prior streaks occurred relative to Apple’s price trend, one occurred early in an uptrend, one was followed by a short-term pullback, and the other was right in the middle of an uptrend,” they added.

However, there are reasons to believe that this most recent rally could continue—if not with more days of consecutive gains, then over the longer term.

Brokers surveyed by FactSet overwhelmingly rate Apple stock at Overweight, with analysts’ average target prices on the stock implying almost 10% further upside.

Wall Street’s expectations for Apple’s earnings this quarter—the January to March period—have also been getting more optimistic. 

By the end of 2021, most analysts’ estimates for profit based on an adjusted metric in the March quarter were unchanged from the prior month. In January, 69% of analysts’ surveyed by FactSet raised their estimates; in February, 77% of estimates were increased. This month, 100% of analysts raised their estimates for earnings.

Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]