Tech giant Microsoft reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings after the bell Wednesday, and on Thursday the shares jumped by 5%, catapulting the company to $1 trillion in market value. Its current share price is hovering around $129.
If you had invested in Microsoft 10 years ago, that decision would have paid off. According to CNBC calculations, a $1,000 investment made on April 25, 2009, would be worth nearly $8,000 as of midday April 25, 2019, for a total return of almost 700%.
Over the same period, the S&P 500 returned just over 300%.
And Microsoft's stock is trending up: It ended Thursday with a gain of more than 3% after earlier in the day briefly surging 5% to a $1 trillion market cap. Revenue climbed 14% to $30.6 billion, beating the $29.84 billion estimate.
While Microsoft's stock has mostly done well over the years, any individual stock can over- or underperform and past returns do not predict future results.
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CNBC: Microsoft stock as of April 25, 2019.
Some analysts believe Microsoft's growth is being driven by its transition to its cloud computing services — which use remote servers hosted online, as opposed to personal, physical ones — to store and manage data. The company's cloud business grew 41% in its most recent quarter to $9.6 billion.
It's also placing an emphasis on transitioning users from traditional productivity products, like Word and Excel, to the cloud-based Office 365 suite. Commercial sales of Office 365 increased 30%.
The company has also experienced some PR struggles this year. It faced complaints of discrimination and harassment in April, for example, as well as criticism about the company's initial response to those complaints.
That led to changes to its human resources policies, including the addition of new training materials around standards of business conduct and more staff to "enhance our listening capacity when issues are first raised," according to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella.
In an email published by Quartz, Nadella wrote: "I'm disappointed to hear about any behavior in our workplace that falls short of the diverse and inclusive culture we are striving to create. But I'm encouraged that people feel empowered to speak up and demand change. I want all of us to learn and act on this feedback."
If you're looking to get into investing, seasoned investors such as Warren Buffett suggest you start with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, meaning they're automatically diversified and tend to be low cost. Plus, because they fluctuate with the market, they're typically less risky than picking individual stocks.
Here's a snapshot of how the markets look now.
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