Despite Share Price Drop, Apple Still DJIA’s Best Performing Stock of 2017

[cnxvideo id=”506829″ placement=”ros”]Shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) dropped $2.29 last week (about 1.6%), closing at $141.05 on Thursday. Markets were closed Friday.

Even so, it remains the best-performing stock by a wide margin among the 30 equities the comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). The company’s stock is up 21.78% year to date, still well above second-place Boeing’s 12.81% improvement.

Apple stock dropped sharply early Tuesday, likely due to a countersuit filed by Qualcomm in response to Apple’s January lawsuit against the chipmaker. Apple has charged Qualcomm with throttling its LTE processors and with abusing its market power. All told, Apple listed 389 specific allegations in its filing.

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In its response, Qualcomm denied all 389 allegations, citing 35 specific defenses to the charges, as well as claiming that the charges are unfounded. There is a lot of money at stake, and these opposing lawsuits will take months or years to sort out.

Apple also got some bad news from Laptop magazine early last week. In the publication’s list of best notebook brands, the MacBook finished fifth behind Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP and Acer (tied with Apple). The company was taken to task for offering too narrow a range of models, and MacBooks were also judged to be too expensive.

Apple shares closed at $141.05 on Thursday, down about 0.5% for the day, in a 52-week range of $89.47 to $145.46. The consensus 12-month price target is $147.61 in a price target range of $104 to $185 per share.

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