Buy one Apple share and you own one 14.6-billionth of Apple. At about $336 a share in late September 2026, the whole company is valued at roughly $4.9 trillion.
That slice sounds too small to matter. It is still a legal claim on a business that made $112bn of profit in its last full year. Apple has also spent the past decade making each of those claims bigger.
What is a stock? A stock is a share of ownership in a company. Owning one gives you a slice of the company's profits and a vote on how it is run.
Owners get paid through dividends, buybacks or a rising share price. None of them is guaranteed.
When a company buys back its own shares, each remaining share owns more of it. Apple's share count fell 42% in twelve years.
A share price moves with profits and with what buyers will pay for each dollar of them. The second can swing hard, as it did in 2022.
These words overlap. "Stock" is ownership of a company in general. A "share" is one unit of it. So you own Apple stock, while you hold ten Apple shares. "Equity" is the accountant's word for the same ownership.
A share gives you three things.
A claim on profits. Apple's profit belongs to its owners. The board decides how much to hand back. It also decides how.
A vote. Each Apple share carries one vote at the annual meeting. Owners vote on who sits on the board, among other things.
Limited risk. If Apple failed, you could lose what you paid for your share. You would not owe any of its debts.
It also leaves some things out.
No right to be paid. A company can keep every dollar it earns. Many pay their owners nothing for years.
No claim on the company's things. You cannot walk into an Apple Store and take an iPhone. The company owns its assets. You own part of the company.
Last in line. If a company goes bust, its lenders are paid first. Shareholders often get nothing.
A company hands money back to its owners in two ways.
A dividend is cash paid to each owner, a fixed amount per share. A share buyback is when the company uses its cash to buy its own shares from the market. Apple then cancels them, so fewer shares are left.
The chart below shows what Apple did with its profit in the year to September 2025. Profit here means net income: what is left after every cost and every tax.
Source: Apple Form 10-K, fiscal 2025
Apple made $112.0bn. It spent $90.7bn buying back its own shares. It paid $15.4bn in dividends. Together that is $106.1bn, about 95% of the year's profit.
Per share, Apple earned $7.46 and paid a dividend of $1.02. At about $336 a share, that dividend is worth about 0.3% of what one share costs. Most of what Apple returns comes through buybacks.
Why buybacks make your slice bigger
Think of Apple as a cake cut into slices. A buyback uses some of Apple's cash to take slices off the plate. Fewer slices are left, so each one is a bigger share of the cake. Your share of Apple grows without you buying anything.
The next chart counts Apple's shares each year. It uses average diluted shares: the average number of shares during the year, plus shares that staff stock awards could still create. Apple split each share into seven in 2014 and into four in 2020. The older years are restated so every bar is in today's terms.
Source: Apple Form 10-K filings, fiscal 2013 to 2025
Apple had 26.1bn shares in fiscal 2013. By fiscal 2025 it had 15.0bn, which is 42% fewer. A share held since 2013 now owns about 1.74 times as much of Apple.
This is why profit per share can grow faster than profit. Apple's net income rose from $37.0bn in fiscal 2013 to $112.0bn in fiscal 2025, about three times. Its profit per share rose from $1.42 to $7.46, a little over five times.
A share price is what the next buyer will pay today for a slice of future profits. Two things move it. The first is the profit itself. The second is how much buyers will pay for each dollar of that profit.
Profit per share is also called earnings per share, or EPS. In the chart below both lines start at 100, so you can compare how far each one has travelled.
Source: Apple Form 10-K filings; YX Insights price data
From September 2016 to September 2025, Apple's profit per share rose about 3.6 times. Its share price, with dividends counted, rose about 10 times. Higher profits explain part of that rise. The rest came from buyers paying more for each dollar of Apple's profit.
That second force works in both directions. In calendar 2022, Apple's share price fell 26%. Its profit per share for fiscal 2022 rose 9%. The business kept growing, while buyers paid less for it.
The risk that comes with owning one
A share carries its falls as well as its gains. Since 2018, Apple's share price has dropped more than 30% from a peak four times:
October 2018 to January 2019: down 39%
February 2020 to March 2020: down 31%
January 2022 to January 2023: down 31%
December 2024 to April 2025: down 33%
Each time, the price went on to recover. Nothing guarantees that it will. Many companies' shares fall and never come back.
How you buy a stock
Shares trade on stock exchanges. Apple trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker AAPL. You buy through a broker, a platform that places the order for you. Many brokers let you buy part of a share, so you do not need $336 to start. The price you pay is whatever buyers and sellers agree on at that moment.
Most shares you can buy are common shares, like Apple's. They carry the vote and the full share of any profit growth. Preferred shares usually pay a fixed dividend. They are paid before common shares if a company fails, but they rarely carry a vote. Apple has no preferred shares in issue.
A share is a slice of a business. Its value comes down to the profits that business earns and what buyers will pay for them.
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DISCLAIMER: This article is strictly educational. Any information or analysis in this note is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Nothing in this note is intended to be investment advice and nor should it be relied upon to make investment decisions. Any opinions, analyses, or probabilities expressed in this note are those of the author as of the note's date of publication and are subject to change without notice.