Yahoo hit a 52-week high of $22.28 Friday morning. At that price, the shares have risen 42% since Marissa Mayer was named CEO of the search company on July 16, 2012. The shares fell back to $21.87 by 1:50 p.m. ET.

The shares are up some 32% this year.

Apple, meanwhile, hit a 52-week low Friday afternoon of $431.82, which represented a 39% decline from the stock's intraday peak of $705.07 on Sept. 19, 2012.

The stock is also down 18.4% for the year.

Yahoo is seen as a company on the move -- at least since Mayer took over last summer. She's brought some discipline to the business, revamped its executive team, got the company to redesign its home page and started to look toward rebuilding its revenue. Mayer has made a few controversial moves. The one that's drawn the most attention is her decision to require all employees to work at the office. Many had previously worked from home. 

Apple is struggling with several issues. One is the perception that its product pipeline may be running dry in the face of strong competition to the iPhone from Samsung. And its iPad tablet is facing increasingly intense competition.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, successor to the late Steve Jobs, told shareholders at this week's annual meeting that the pipeline is full of all sorts of fun devices that will excite the core Apple customer base. There's talk about a wrist device and continuing chatter about an Apple television.

Apple is also struggling to figure out what to do with the $137 billion or so in cash and securities on its balance sheet. That's a lot of very liquid or fairly liquid assets. In fact, it represents nearly 70% of total assets.

We should note that Yahoo has a long way to go before its market capitalization approaches its peak level of around $97 billion at the end of 1999. Its market capitalization now is $26 billion. Rival Google has a market cap of about $265 billion.

Apple's market cap is tops in the world at $407 billion, just ahead of Exxon Mobil (XOM) at $401 billion.

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