New Highs for Some High Fliers (AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, RAX)

Despite the downturn in chip stocks today following the lowered outlook from Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), there are some stocks doing quite well, thank you very much. Shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) are making new all-time highs again today, and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has touched a level it hasn’t seen in nearly five years.

Apple has hit a new high of $682.17 in advance of the company’s expected announcement next week of a new iPhone 5. Amazon posted a new high of $258.42 following its announcement yesterday of new models of the Kindle e-reader and the Kindle Fire tablets.

And Google has put up a mark of $712.25, not far from its all-time high of near $747 in December 2007. Google’s march to previous heights, unlike the moves by Apple and Amazon, appears to be the result of the steady hand of Larry Page at the company’s helm. Page has trimmed some questionable projects and added a few new ones that are making a difference to the company’s expected fortunes.

Another stock making a new all-time high today is cloud computing vendor Rackspace Hosting Inc. (NYSE: RAX), which posted a top of $64.59. To some extent, Rackspace faces its biggest threat from Amazon Web Services, which is not a perfect spot for the smaller company to find itself in. Still, Rackspace has been growing fast and so has the share price.

Paul Ausick