Apple's Year

Apple is set to report its earnings today, a long way from where the company was a year ago. The company’s stock has more than doubled over the past 12 months, and its market capitalization is now around $1.4 trillion.

At this time last year, Apple reported that sales of its iPhone were slowing, and that China was proving to be a more sluggish market than expected; it fell 7.6 percent on the day it reported earnings. That capped off three months in which the stock had dropped by more than 30 percent.

Now things are totally different. There are only two other S&P 500 index components that have doubled in the past year: Advanced Micro Devices is up 130.5 percent and Lam Research Corp. is 119.1 percent. But those semiconductor companies are much smaller than Apple - AMD’s market cap is $53.3 billion, and Lam’s market cap is $43.5 billion.