Is Apple stock a buy right now?

is Apple a buy right now so apple is such a famous company we all know it it was the king of Investments for a long time but I think nvidia's kind of taken its Throne now as the most popular investment and it was the world's largest company it's been battling with Microsoft for that title for a while now looking likely that Nvidia will probably take the top spot very soon but anyway afle is great company and it always has been a great company ever since 2007 where it just completely destructed its market for phones when they had their iPhone Market which made a phone have a touch screen and then people doubted it and it just completely changed the world and the iPhone has probably been the most successful product in history making over a revenue of around $2 trillion do just from sales from the iPhone alone which is incredible first let's look at the financials $3.48 trillion market cap so again this is going to be one of those stocks and I keep covering big and large stocks you're not going to get a 10x in 10 15 years with this all this is is a lowrisk company that you could buy that you might be able to outperform the market so the S&P 500 has got returns of around 16% a year 15 16% a year for the past five years each year with dividends reinvested so can you beat those returns with apple now it is a lot riskier owning a stock like this but let's have a look at the growth so we do get a dividend yeld at 0.44% used to be close to 1% but Apple has grown quite a lot in the stock price valuation in six months up 26.69 because of hype from the iPhone 16 which is going to be their AI phone of course got the word AI just used there so that is what Wall Street is loving to hear at the moment up 21% the past year 5 years beating the market of course up 338 but 5 years long time frame and I don't think we'll be getting that again with a company like apple so let's go over the financials the 34p ratio is very high to be honest compared to other Tech names but Microsoft for example is growing kind of similar and has the same p ratio but the difference is Microsoft has their own sort of AI products they've got Bing's co-pilot and they have a 49% stake in open AI this could change though as it's rumored that Nvidia and Apple going to invest in open AI so maybe Microsoft potential ownership will shrink a bit but anyway let's go on to the main thing about Apple so Apple just makes so much money and I see a thing that people miss a lot so when you're investing in a company we obviously have the p ratio that I use a lot and then people will be they'll they'll say this company is going to make this amount of money in five years and then they'll just put a multiple on that like a p ratio of 20 for example and they'll say so that means this stock will be worth x amount so if they make 10 billion doar in income in five years and it has a 10p ratio it's going to be worth $100 billion as the market cap but companies especially Apple they make money on the way as they are getting to these valuations and just throughout the whole time because if it's a profitable company it's making a profit and what do they do with this profit in Apple's case they reinvest it back into the company they do share BuyBacks so they give it back to investors because there's just going to be less shares out there as they're buying their own shares and we can see here we've got an increase in free cash flow that has dwindled since 2022 when it was up massively now it's dwindled it will likely go up again but this is not a good sign to see in the previous two years but anyway free cash flow is free cash flow you're going to get a return on your investment that can also be attributed to a lot of Apple's previous growth so here we go this is share BuyBacks quarterly we can see they hit a all-time high in the previous quarter of June which is a very good sign for investors I used to think it was bad thing but you can only do so much when you've got this amount of money do you know what I mean like Nvidia does share BuyBacks everyone does share BuyBacks and they're still great companies it's not like it's only bad when they're taking on debt taking on Leverage to do these share BuyBacks apple on the other hand has the money in cash they got plenty of cash they can afford to do all these share BuyBacks and this is returning back to investors some of the money that they have spent on investing in the company so very good this does mean that you're going to get guaranteed gains potentially if the stock price doesn't fall if the stock traded flat and earnings were flat you would still get a gain from the company buying back their shares so that is a good thing for first of all secondly let's go on to their financials so a good thing you've got to do is just map out because investing you're obviously going to be looking into the future I'm buying it now I think it's going to make more money in the future and you have to project that there's a lot of analysts covering Apple because it's such a popular famous company so for next year let's do 2025 let's do the average estimate they seem to be beating slightly but analysts are very close to Apple's sort of financials and it does have quite High p ratio so I would say it's quite priced in all the Beats anyway so we got a 7.48 so we're going to divide 230 ided by 7.48 gives us a forward p ratio of 30.7 so it's just at that ceiling that I would say tech stocks because the tech stock ceiling has mostly been around 30p ratio as the upper limit and we're now at 30.7 for next year for Apple so it is quite reasonable to be honest you might not get too many gains for next year because a lot of it is already priced in with the iPhone 16 hype but if you hold for longer let's say you hold for up to five years I do think you are going to do very well because apple is at the point where there's no really destruction to their business because nobody's going to really overtake the iPhone or change the iPhone too much but there is some risk with Google for example where AI could disrup them but Apple has an advantage as it's the actual piece of Hardware that is being used here and let's go on to Apple's other bets so when you've got these huge companies and they've already got their massive markets and make loads of money they have to go to other bets like Google has wayo as another bet Apple tried to get into the car business now the car business is not that good for the margins long term they're quite good now for electric cars it would be quite good if they actually got into it and did it but of course they they scrapped it and that's probably a good thing but they don't really have anything else going for them like they they're not doing their own AI product so they kind of needed something else and they haven't done that yet which is why I prefer companies like Google or Microsoft as they have ai products but anyway they scrapped it it might have been a good idea to keep going but they clearly had a reason not to the electric car industry is about to go up a lot as the batteries keep getting cheaper and cheaper and Innovation just makes the cars more attractive than ever I know Tesla for example everyone used to say about the build quality but they innovated they changed the design improved it and nobody says that anymore back because back in the end of 20122 they changed it there's a new model for Tesla Model y the Juniper coming out in 2025 the start of it I think and that's going to be incredible I think and it's going to be built even better so Apple could have competed in this and probably made a decent amount of money I'm sure Apple would have sold so many cars everyone would have want an Apple car it might have worn off but it's good for test for investors they're not getting into it because it means less competition so the next big thing is the Apple iPhone 16 so the iPhone was kind of getting a bit boring as nobody really cared about the new iPhone coming out but the a iPhone really has and I've seen it in my life with my friends saying that they would actually get an iPhone 16 people talking about it and I would get one myself so there's actually something to this product and the stock price did go up from the hype from this I do think it is quite important and the next thing for apple and this is some real proof that the demand will be big so Apple actually increased their production by 10% for this up and cominging iPhone 16 so clearly they can tell and they have some data to prove that there will be an increased market for the iPhone 16 which is very good indeed so that is Apple's next big thing really is just the iPhone 16 I can't really find anything else because they scrapped the car business they have apple intelligence but they're not really making any sort of llm to compete with open AI chat GPT or Google's Gemini for example so they're not really doing that but they do have the iPhone 16 and it is just a lowrisk company it's such a great business business that will likely keep profiting and returning it to investors through share BuyBacks this is another chart of Apple's net income we can see how stagnant it's been but it has actually come up in the previous quarters 101 billion so we are literally just at all-time highs by barely anything I assumed by next year we will have some quarters that will finally break out of this consolidation that they've had the past two years so this is definitely a good sign and yeah I'm quite happy with the fact that it's broken out there so overall is Apple stock buy right now it depends a lot to be honest because if you're very like a risky and you don't in mind holding individual stocks then I'd say go for it but other than that I do think the S&P 500 is a better risk to reward basis I didn't invest in Apple a year ago I invested in Nvidia meta Microsoft and Google all because I wanted to get in on the AI sort of thing I knew that was going to be big so I invested it was like over a year ago I think and they did quite well I didn't invest in Apple because they just didn't have an AI play they weren't talking about doing it and there just wasn't any information they just didn't have one so I avoided investing in them which was a good idea because having more money in Nvidia clearly is a better thing to do from over a year ago but Apple is it a buy or is it not personally I think you can buy this and still make money you potentially might outperform the overall Market but I do think on a risk adjusted basis just buying and holding the S&P 500 would be better than buying Apple stock at this point