

Apple's bags of cash vs the S&P 500 - mathattack
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/03/corporate-cash-and-apple.html

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apaprocki
The total cash and marketable securities (the Apple 96.7B figure) for the S&P
500 is 2.84T. So out of just the S&P 500 Apple is 3.44%. I'm not sure where
the 12% figure stated in the article is coming from.

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mathattack
Apologies for posting a linked article to a linked article to an unlinked
Moody's report... FT sometimes has a paywall, so I prefer to link to a
summary.

The FT article ([http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/03/14/923981/a-us-
corpo...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/03/14/923981/a-us-corporate-
cash-update/)) quotes a total corporate cash # of 1.3 trillion (bottom chart)
and projects growth from 150 million. Mess with the numerator and denominator
both and you get the shift.

What's your source on the 2.84T?

It appears the article takes into account ST & LT liquid investments, so it's
probably not a difference in accounting.

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apaprocki
I loaded up the S&P 500 into the equity screener on the Bloomberg terminal and
got a sum for the cash and marketable securities column. (Apple correctly
shows 96.7B in the column, so I know it is comparing apples to apples.) The
data comes from the latest filing of each company.

edit: I see what they did. The bottom chart is showing _cash from operations_
, which is a totally different data point. That chart is old (2011 Q3).. the
_cash from operations_ value for the S&P 500 is now 1.65T and Apple is 45.31B,
or roughly 2.75%.

Their "Top 10" list is wrong by either metric. The 10 companies with the
highest cash and marketable securities (what they are showing) are:

    
    
      JPMorgan Chase     - $380.20B
      Bank of America    - $357.29B
      Berkshire Hathaway - $162.47B
      Bank NY Mellon     - $135.25B
      General Electric   - $131.87B
      Apple Inc          - $ 97.60B
      State St Corp      - $ 68.12B
      Wells Fargo & Co   - $ 63.81B
      Goldman Sachs      - $ 56.01B
      Microsoft Corp     - $ 51.74B

~~~
mathattack
Interesting. I was thinking they just left out banks. Amazing the power of
dividing apples by oranges. :-)

