Apple stock breaks $500 a share barrier

The price of Apple stock soared past $500 a share for the first time on Monday on the popularity of its mobile devices including the iPhone.

The company's stock continues its relentless rise sweeping aside all thresholds in its way, like the latest $500-a-share barrier, a new record, with the stock rising $9.18 higher to $502.60.

After it overtook ExxonMobil as the most valuable company in the world, Apple's market value is now worth 16 per cent more than Exxon's (See: Apple's value beats sum of Google + Microsoft, overtakes ExxonMobil). Apple shares have shot 40 per cent since last February and nearly 500 per cent gain from five years ago.

Given its ability to dominate any market it enters, Apple provides investors all they need to spurn conventional wisdom about stocks, including:

•The crowd is always wrong:  Well not quite always. Investors bullish on Apple stock have proved that wisdom wrong. The stock that has given them one of the biggest rides in recent times, has 38 of 40 Wall Street analysts strongly rooting for it.

•Big companies, eventually, run into difficulty maintaining their growth rates, according to conventional market wisdom. As companies grow to  big-cap publicly traded companies starting from small beginnings, their growth rates eventually taper off.