I Think Apple is Getting Re-Rated to $400 So I’m Buying Again and Again

I Think Apple is Getting Re-Rated to $400 So I’m Buying Again and Again Alex Sirois Tue, September 8, 2026 at 9:41 PM GMT+9 4 min read AAPL -2.51% Quick Read Apple (AAPL) posted its 9th straight EPS beat at $2.02 vs. $1.89 expected, with revenue surging 16% to $109B, bolstering the bull case toward $400.

Apple's 75.6% Services gross margin on $30.74B quarterly revenue, paired with a $100B buyback, keeps shrinking the float and compounding per-share earnings.

Cook flagged memory pricing as a '100-year flood,' and a one-time tariff refund added 11 cents to EPS, making future comparisons harder.

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I keep hitting the buy button on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) because the math on a re-rating toward $400 keeps getting easier to defend, and every quarter Tim Cook hands me another reason to add. Shares closed at $319.97 on September 4, 2026, up 33.94% over the past year, and I am still adding.

My thesis is simple. Apple runs a dual-engine business where a $54 billion hardware quarter now travels with a services annuity that keeps setting records, and management is retiring the share count fast enough to lift per-share earnings even in a flat quarter. That combination is what I keep paying for.

The Q3 FY26 report backs it up. Revenue landed at $109.42B, up 16.36% YoY, EPS came in at $2.02 vs $1.89 consensus, and that was the 9th straight EPS beat. iPhone revenue was $54.25B against $44.58B a year prior, and Services printed $30.74B. Cook called it "our strongest June quarter ever", and this time the superlative fit.

First, the Services engine. A 75.6% Services gross margin on $30.74B of quarterly revenue is a software business hiding inside a hardware wrapper, and paid subscriptions surpassed 1.5 billion. That is recurring income that compounds.

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Second, the capital return program is doing the heavy lifting on per-share math. The board authorized a new $100 billion buyback and a 4% dividend increase in Q2 FY26. Apple has already repurchased $62.094B in the first nine months of FY26, on top of $90.711B in FY25 buybacks. The quarterly dividend sits at $0.27.

Third, the installed base of 2.5 billion+ active devices is the moat. Return on equity of 171.42% and return on invested capital of 53.35% tell you what that base does to profitability.

Analysts now model $9.5329 in FY27 EPS across 39 analysts. Our internal five-year base case models a final price of $508.47, with a bull case of $518.38 and a bear case ending at $358.68. That is the asymmetry I want in a core retirement holding.

Q3 gross margin got a one-time lift from tariff refunds worth roughly two percentage points and 11 cents of EPS. Strip that out and next year's comparisons get harder. Memory pricing is what Cook flagged as "a 100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices". Valuation is rich too, with a P/FCF of 47 and a yield of only 0.33%.

My thesis holds. Apple guided September-quarter revenue growth of 9% to 11% even with a 2.5 percentage point FX headwind, and iPhone and Mac demand is running so hot that Cook called the supply crunch "a demand forecast issue". That is the problem I want a company I own to have.

Services keep compounding, the buyback keeps shrinking the float, the installed base keeps feeding both. When a business earns $29.79B in a quarter and hands back $33 billion to shareholders, patience is the only edge I need. I plan to keep accumulating until $400 stops looking like a floor.

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