Apple is too powerful for the Dow Jones Industrial Average

In the face of the shrinking economy and broad market decline, AAPL yesterday surged 2.8 percentat $411.65 a share for a market valuation of $381.62 billion. The Cupertino, California gadget king has been worth more than Exxon Mobil since August 2011. The latter used to be the world’s most-valued company bar none for a long time. Apple’s market cap is also approaching the combined value of Microsoft and Google.

Today, we’ve been served another eyebrow-raising factoid which helps paint Apple’s ever-growing influence in the world, via Bloomberg:

Putting Apple Inc. (AAPL) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average would mean the benchmark gauge would get 22 percent of its value from the iPhone maker, too much influence even for the world’s largest company, according to Bespoke Investment Group LLC. Apple, trading at about $420, would have the largest weighting in the 30-company measure because Dow companies are ranked by stock price, not market value.

Apple shares would have to be split if the stock were included in the Dow, the investment group wrote in a note to clients: “If the stock were added to the index without a split in the shares, it would have a disproportionate weight in the index, making it more like the Dow Jones Industrial Apple.”

Dow Jones Industrial Apple, we love the sound of that. Another quick nugget: Shares of Apple are now worth 91 times their 1997 value when Steve Jobs had been appointed interim CEO…

AAPL vs. XOM: Apple has previously passed Exxon and is now the world’s most-valued company.

It should be noted that market valuation doesn’t really mean that much. Market valuation of any company has its ups and downs and is prone to both macroeconomic and microeconomic conditions, thereby changing quite often. Market valuation, however, tells us one thing, and that is how confident investors are in a company and how high their expectations related to future fortunes are. Trends do matter, mind you, and these days Apple is killing it in style. In April, Apple had hit one-fifth of the Nasdaq-100 index, prompting Nasdaq OMX Group Inc which operates the Nasdaq exchange to rebalance Apple’s share of the index to 12.33 percent, down from 20.99 percent.