Apple shares hit all-time high above $118 as market cap flirts with $700B

Shares of Apple stock reached a new all-time high on Monday, rising to $118.63 at the closing bell with a record market capitalization of nearly $700 billion.

Apple opened the day at $116.85, slightly above last Friday's close of $116.47, and ended at $118.64. The record-breaking performance represents a 1.85 percent jump from previous close, no mean feat for a stock that recently completed a seven-to-one split. Calculated as pre-split pricing, AAPL shares would have ended the day at more than $830.

As for market cap, Apple soared to a record $695.72 billion, just shy of the $700 billion barrier and well over a previous watershed of $659 billion, surpassed earlier this month. Last week, a number of top hedge funds agreed that Apple will be the first company in history to reach a market cap of $1 trillion in 2015, largely thanks to booming iOS device sales.

Over the weekend, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed his iPhone sales forecast covering the upcoming two calendar quarters, predicting Apple to sell 71.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2014. Driving sales is the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of all iPhone sales, according to Kuo's model.

Things are expected to slow down for iPhone in the first quarter of 2015, with only 50 million units shipped for a quarter-over-quarter contraction of 30.9 percent. Helping bolster sell-through early next year is growth on low-end models like the iPhone 5C and iPhone 4S, the latter supposedly being marketed to emerging markets.