As 2018 ends, Microsoft, not Apple, is the most valuable public company in the world

For most of 2018, there was a two-way battle between Apple and Amazon to see which of the two would be the first U.S. publicly traded company to be worth one trillion dollars. Though Apple was in the lead, becoming the most valuable exchange-traded company in the world, some analysts extrapolated Amazon's 300% move from its 2016 bottom and figured that the creator of the smart speaker category would hit the tape first.

But on August 2nd, just days after Apple reported a strong fiscal third quarter, the company's stock finally reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion. ...