One of our highest-conviction ideas became the most valuable company in the history of America this week...
Consumer-products giant Apple closed at $126.46 on Thursday, pushing its market capitalization to more than $735 billion – the first U.S. company to achieve the milestone.
The stock shot higher this week after investment bank JPMorgan raised its year-end price target for the company from $140 to $145... Analyst Rod Hall is bullish on the launch of the company's "smartwatch." He increased his 2015 and 2016 earnings-per-share estimates.
To use the Apple Watch, you need an iPhone 5 or newer. Hall estimates there will be 400 million iPhone users by next month. He sees that number rising to 525 million by year's end, and to 627 million by the end of 2016.
He expects 5% penetration for the Apple Watch this year (or 26.3 million units).
The Apple Watch will likely be a success for Apple... Selling 26.3 million units at a launch is a huge number. But it's still a ways off from the 74.5 million iPhones Apple sold in the fourth quarter of 2014 – when it earned $18 billion (the highest quarterly earnings in corporate history).
Everybody is talking about the Apple Watch. But we don't think it will come close to generating as much cash for Apple as another product it recently launched...
Have you used Apple Pay yet?
It's the mobile-payment application available on the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. And it's going to be huge...
Mobile payments will revolutionize the payments space just like credit cards did... and might even make cash obsolete one day.
According to credit-card giant Visa, Americans are now twice as likely to carry a mobile phone as they are to hold cash. Those between the ages of 18 and 34 are four times as likely.
People today are glued to their cell phones... They're never out of arm's reach. Mobile payments take advantage of the ubiquity of cell phones... and make paying for goods and services more convenient.
Now, you can load multiple credit cards, debit cards, rewards cards, etc. on your phone... You don't have to pull out your wallet and fumble through pieces of plastic. You just wave your cell phone over the payment processor and voilà, the transaction is done.
Plus, mobile payments are much more secure than credit cards. I won't go into much detail about the technology here, but I do want to share some numbers...
Already, Apple Pay is responsible for 50% of mobile purchases at fast-food giant McDonald's. And Apple Pay is already working with 90% of the country's most-used payment cards.
Plus, the technology is still in its early stages.
In 2012, only 120 million cell phones were equipped with the technology for mobile payments. That number doubled to 275 million in 2013. And according to research firm IHS Technology, that number will grow four-fold to 1.2 billion phones by 2018.
Media website Business Insider says use of in-store mobile payments will grow 4,200% by 2018.
Even the government is signing on... President Obama signed an executive order mandating that certain government agencies ready themselves to accept mobile payments.
You can, of course, buy shares of Apple to profit from this trend. The company receives $0.15 for every $100 spent using Apple Pay. Given the massive growth potential in this market, that royalty alone will add a fortune to Apple's bottom line.
Apple is a great buy today, regardless of Apple Pay. Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig rates shares a "Strong Buy" today. Extreme Value editor Dan Ferris believes Apple is a $1 trillion company... and laid out a few steps Apple could take to boost its share price.
But there are other companies making the "guts" for mobile-payments technology that will absolutely soar as this technology goes mainstream.
Again, we're still in the early stages of this trend... Before too long, mobile payments will be just as ubiquitous as credit cards.
Consider this... Major credit-card companies are mandating the use of a certain technology that enables mobile payments at merchant locations throughout the U.S. by October. In other words, credit cards see the future... and they're going all in.
Doc Eifrig just put together a report explaining the details of mobile-payments technologies, the huge growth potential, and some of the major players involved.
It's a great and fast way to learn everything you need to know about this new technology.
In the report, he also shares the names of the companies that will profit the most from this growing technology.
The informative presentation Doc prepared is free for everyone to watch. It's a fascinating look into the future of mobile payments... and what the world will look like going forward.
To gain access to the names of the specific companies Doc recommends to profit, you need to subscribe to Retirement Millionaire. Right now, you can sign up for a 100% risk-free trial subscription for just $39. That's an incredible value for one of the best financial advisories available today... Plus, getting in on the ground floor of this long-term megatrend could pay for your subscription several times over.