Five years ago, Apple was a successful company with the iPod and its Mac line of computers. But it had not yet launched the iPhone. It had not yet launched the iPad. Back then, Apple’s yearly profit was $2.4 billion. In 2010 that number had risen to $16.6 billion. And in the first quarter of 2011, Apple has already made a $6 billion profit, well on its way to eclipsing previous years. It’s become a cash machine.

Apple is riding a wave of continuous success, and the stock market simply loves it. The value of the company has skyrocketed.

That’s the part we will take a closer look at in this article. How well has Apple done compared with other big tech companies in the last five years, i.e. 2011 compared to 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone?

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In a year in which tech companies have struggled to stay alive, Apple’s stock has doubled.

In January of 2009, Apple stock was priced at $78. Last week, it closed at $184. Also late last week, three major investment firms elevated their expectations for Apple. On Thursday, Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner increased his target price for Apple from $185 to $210, while Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig increased his target from $185 to $220. On Friday, UBS analyst Maynard Um jumped on the Apple bandwagon, and raised the bet, escalating Apple’s target price from $170 to $265.

A 236% jump in stock price from January to October would be remarkable for any company. But in the case of Apple, it happened under the most bizarre of circumstances.

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There has been a lot of talk this week about the Dow Jones stock index dipping below 8000 for the first time since 2003.

Now let’s put this into perspective with a very telling old ad.

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The recent world-wide financial chaos has reminded us how sensitive the stock market is, with sharp up- and downturns. Now imagine the reaction of the stock traders if they couldn’t trade at all. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.

Stock exchanges usually have strict SLAs and high demands on availability, but they can’t completely avoid downtime. We have gathered up some of the major stock exchange outages that have occurred so far this decade (i.e. since 2000 and onward) and listed when and why they happened.

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