Apple trades around $313 a share, roughly 9% below its 52-week high of $344.57 but comfortably above both its 50-day ($311.22) and 200-day ($282.12) moving averages. On Investily's report card, it scores 74 out of 100 — a solid grade, but the lowest of the three names in this series, and the reason why is very specific: it's not growth, it's the balance sheet.
The Investily score: 74/100
Apple's report card is almost a mirror image of Palantir's: excellent growth and returns, but the weakest ratios pillar of any stock we've covered so far.
- Revenue growth: exceptional
- Operating income growth: exceptional
- Free cash flow growth: exceptional
- Profit margin: near-perfect
- Debt, liquidity, and current ratio: the weakest scores on the card
Apple isn't being marked down for slowing down. It's being marked down for how it runs its balance sheet.
Growth: reaccelerating
Revenue grew 16.3% over the trailing year, well above its own 9.3% three-year trailing growth rate — a sign the business has picked up pace, not slowed down. Free cash flow grew even faster, up 51.9% over the trailing year, while operating income grew 21.1%. Cash generation growing faster than revenue is a healthy pattern: it means Apple is converting more of each incremental sales dollar into cash than it did a year ago.
Profitability & returns
Net margin sits at 24.3% — roughly a quarter of every revenue dollar becomes profit, and Investily scores this at the top of its range. Return on capital employed over the trailing year comes in at 68.4%, well ahead of Palantir's 9.1% and not far behind Nvidia's 82.4%. On pure profitability and capital efficiency, Apple is playing in the same league as Nvidia.
Balance sheet & ratios: the drag on the score
This is where Apple's report card breaks from the other two names. Its leverage, current ratio, and quick ratio scores are all negative or near-zero — the weakest marks anywhere in this series. That's not a sign of financial distress; Apple has spent years returning cash to shareholders through buybacks rather than holding it on the balance sheet, which structurally thins its short-term liquidity ratios even though the underlying business is enormously cash-generative. It's a deliberate capital-allocation choice that shows up as a weakness in a ratios-based score, not a red flag about the business itself.
Valuation: paying up for quality
Apple trades at roughly 36x earnings and 43x book value — expensive on both counts, and the highest price-to-book of the three stocks in this series. Its PEGY ratio sits at 1.12, just over the 1.0 line that typically separates cheap from expensive — meaning the stock is priced slightly ahead of what its growth rate alone would justify, even with growth reaccelerating.
The bottom line
Apple's 74/100 score isn't a story about a weakening business — growth and returns both look strong and are reaccelerating. The score is being held down almost entirely by a ratios pillar that reflects a capital-return strategy, not underlying risk, while the market is charging a real premium for that quality at a PEGY just above 1.0. Whether that premium is worth paying depends on how much weight you put on balance-sheet structure versus the growth and margin numbers driving the rest of the score.