By the way, we might think of Steve Jobs with a McDuck money bin, but in fact, he and all the other officers and directors put together own 1% of the common stock. The biggest shareholder, at 6.6%, is Fidelity.
The $15 bil in cash holdings is up from last year’s $10 bil, with no debt.
These figures are from Value Line, as of yesterday.
Only if you found 150,000 banks. Which kinda defeats the 11 figure goal.
But isn’t it the stock and mutual fund owners within Fidelity that own 6.6% combined? Most companies are going to have the Fidelity and Vanguard types owning huge chunks of company shares, but are owned by individual investors in very small portions.
I’m not sure I understand your question. The Apple shares are probably owned by more than one of Fidelity’s mutual funds. Mutual fund owners (such as me) own shares of a basket of stocks owned by the mutual fund. One of the limitations of a mutual fund is their own rules about how big a piece of any one company they can own. 6.6% is probably the most Fidelity can own of Apple. The whole point of a mutual fund is diversification. The fund owns shares of hundreds of companies, more companies than I with my limited money could possibly own.
If you mean that some individuals within Fidelity personally own a sizable chunk of Apple, then no, that’s not how a mutual fund is added up. Any Fidelity stockholder is free to personally buy Apple, but that’s not counted as part of Fidelity’s total.
I thought it was $100,000 per account, so you could have all 150,000 accounts at the same bank at still be completely insured.
I think what he’s asking is if it is actually Fidelity who owns the shares as a company, or is just representing Fidelity’s investment managing of other people money.
Fidelity doesn’t really own 6.6% of the company. JoeBlow1 actually owns .0000001 percent of the company and JoeBlow2 owns .00000002 etc. percent of the company through investmests managed by Fidelity that add up to a 6.6% stake total.
I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. AFAIK, mutual funds and the like are essentially legal entities that own their investments outright. The fund investors own shares in the fund, but don’t actually own their tiny fraction of what the fund invests in. (Similar to how an Apple shareholder owns a share of the company, but doesn’t actually own a tiny fraction of the desks and chairs at Apple HQ.)
ETA: So the biggest Apple shareholder is the Fidelity funds, not Fidelity’s individual investors.
It is $100,000 per unique account. My personal savings account is different from my joint account with my spouse and that is different from my accounts for my minor kids. However, you cannot evade the $100,000 limit by setting up multiple accounts owned by exactly the same owner at the same bank. The spirit of that law is that there is a limit to the amount protected. Otherwise, it would cost us more in taxes and people would complain about taxes being used to effectively protect Apple’s $15B.
And friedo is right about Fidelity–the funds themselves are considered to be the owners of Apple’s stock–the joe blows are considered to be owners of only the Fidelity funds for reporting purposes.
Cash reserves is somewhat of a fiction. A company has “assets” and “liabilities” of various sorts. Legally, they have to be equal; that is, you have to “balance” them (on a balance sheet, of course). Your liabilities include debt and accounts payable (money you owe people), among other things. Your assets include inventory, accounts receivable (money people owe you), etc. If your assets besides “cash” are larger than your liabilities, the difference is “cash on hand”. As you accumulate it, this becomes “cash reserves”.
You use cash reserves to avoid borrowing, make acquisitions, hedge against expenses like lawsuits, etc.
You could lend out the money yourself, but then it would become a non-cash asset (something like “loans outstanding”). As someone else has noted, to do this as an ongoing business, you have additional legal requirements.
A company’s CFO sometimes is involved in managing the cash, but traditionally it’s done by a “treasurer” or the “treasury” department of a company. This department monitors the markets to balance return on investment against liquidity for all the company’s cash assets.