Enlarge / Ready, take aim, and let fly... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

As the price of heavily shorted stocks like GameStop has shot up in recent days , so too has interest in retail trading apps like Robinhood . That app, launched in 2013 with a promise to "democratize finance for all," offers so-called retail investors simple, zero-fee trades as an easy way to gamble on quick movement of individual stocks.

But that smooth path to playing the market hit a bump Thursday morning, when Robinhood announced that it was suspending the ability to purchase 13 extremely volatile stocks, including GameStop.

In the hours following the announcement, GameStop's stock price first shot up to a high of nearly $470, then cratered to a low of about $126 by 11:20am. The price then turned back upward and has currently stabilized around $310 as of this writing.

Enlarge / Apple's global headquarters in Cupertino, California. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The last 24 hours have overflowed with stock market news, from the normal to the nutty , but based on Apple's performance in recent quarters, the earnings the Cupertino company reported today for its first quarter of 2021 were very much on the normal side. And by that, we mean big numbers yet again.

According to the report, Apple crossed the threshold for $100 billion in revenue in a single quarter for the first time, and the company posted double-digit sales increases for every single one of its defined product categories. Overall, sales were up 21 percent year-over-year, despite many consumers' struggles in the pandemic-stricken economy.

iPhone revenue was $65.6 billion, surpassing analysts' expected $59.8 billion, and beating the same quarter last year by 17 percent. This coincides with the introduction of the iPhone 12 lineup (iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max), which was the most substantial redesign and upgrade to iPhones since the iPhone X three years earlier.

Enlarge / Pop goes the bubble... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images )

Last week, an epic short squeeze had driven GameStop stock up to $40 a share , a roughly 1,500 percent increase from its low point nine months ago. Little did anyone know at the time that this would only be the beginning of the story.

As I write this, GameStop's stock price is hovering around $350, up another 775 percent or so since I wrote about this situation eight days ago. By the time you read this, that number may be horribly outdated, as the stock continues to bounce up and down with extreme volatility hour by hour (it dipped down as low as $61 and peaked as high as $159 on Friday).

The current stock price now gives the company a market cap of about $26 billion.