5 Safe Stocks To Invest In

4. Apple Inc.  (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 131

Erik Woodring at Morgan Stanley holds an Overweight rating and a $220 price target on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) as of July 25.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is an information technology company manufacturing and marketing smartphones, laptops, tablets, and more. It is based in Cupertino, California.

There were 131 hedge funds long Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in the first quarter, with a total stake value of $165.2 billion.

Wedgewood Partners said the following about Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in its second-quarter 2023 investor letter:

“Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) contributed to positive performance during the quarter despite declining revenues and operating earnings mostly driven by difficult comparisons in its Mac segment. iPhone sales grew as supply chain bottlenecks seem to be in the rearview mirror, with component prices falling. The Company also highlighted the torrid growth of its App Store ecosystem, which saw over $1.1 trillion in billings on the platform during 2022, more than double the billings in 2019. Apple has tremendous leverage across the mobile economy due to the App Store’s mission-critical relevance to both developers and users. We continue to hold Apple as a top weighting in the portfolio because this asset-light ecosystem drives sustainably high returns on invested capital.

In January 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco. At the time of that momentous day, Jobs had not planned for third-party developers to build native software applications (apps) for the iPhone’s internal operating software (iOS). However, later that year, bowing to considerable pressure from the developer community, Jobs relented. When the second-generation iPhone (3G) was released in the summer of 2008, Apple announced the opening of the iPhone App Store at the same time. According to the Company in July 2009, after just the first 12 months since the launch of the App Store, 1.5 billion apps were downloaded from 65,000 apps from more than 100,000 developers from 77 countries.

That early symbiotic relationship between the iPhone (hardware) and the App Store (software) completely redefined the utility of the iPhone (think Intel and Microsoft). Too bad American Express coined the phrase, “Don’t Leave Home Without It.” That perfectly describes the utility of the modern iPhone. Heck, for years now, most of us won’t walk from the kitchen to the garage without it…” (Click here to read the full text)