Whenever I start to think like this, I remind myself that it's about as useless as thinking "if only I bet it all on 00" at the roulette table.
Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply. But if I had one there's a lot better ways to make money than using it to buy 10 shares of Apple 20 years ago.
>Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply.
Yes, but Apple, from 1999 until Jobs died at least, and for some time more, gave people opportunity after opportunity to buy a constantly sky-rocketing stock. If someone didn't see it with the first iMac (1999 IIRC), they should have seen it with the iPod. If not, then with the iPhone. They had many chances to buy that stock.
Yes, but again, this is in hindsight. For all you knew back then, it could crash at any time, and any other company could also skyrocket.
The point is, right now, any of the hundreds of startups you see just starting now /could/ potentially be the next Facebook. Statistically, most won't be. But of course in 20 years, you won't remember thinking about buying stocks for all the companies that failed. You'll only remember how you once considered buying stock fort his one company that is huge now.
>Yes, but again, this is in hindsight. For all you knew back then, it could crash at any time, and any other company could also skyrocket.
That's the same for every company, so it's a moot point. What would the lesson from that be? Nobody has a crystal ball, so nobody should invest in any stock?
Since investing does happen, and is based on signs and trends, what I'm saying is that Apple gave many of those repeatedly, and if someone didn't see a revived company when the original iMac came out, and then OS X 10.0, and then the iPod, and then the iPhone, and then the iPad, etc, then they only have their selves to blame.
You seriously can't fathom that knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. gives you more information than random chance? How do you make any informed choice about anything at all then?
I can fathom it, but not on a 20-year timeline. The market prices stocks with all the information available. It's not perfect obviously, but it's better than any other price-generation algorithm that lacks a crystal ball. I you happen to have a unique perspective that the rest of the market lacks, then you can invest in that stock and make a good return.
But 20 years out, the hypothetical "I wish I had bought AAPL in 1996" is just as useless as the "I wish I had bet on green" comparison. In this scenario, it's an apt comparison.
Anyone making an informed choice in 1996, knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. would have stayed the hell away from AAPL
Actually a lot of people believe they are a random distribution. There is a great book "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" which explains it.
The basic idea is the market is efficient (the Efficient Market Theory) and all information about the stock is alreay priced into the stock. Picking a stock to beat the market average is basically a random chance.
Sure, across all investments. Pro-tip don't invest in all investments.
Real life markets are very clearly not perfectly efficient. Nor is stock price a perfect reflection of available information. Many/most/all? stock is prices on expectation i.e. guesses, not facts. Then there are all sorts of shenanigans like astroturfing and illegal manipulations/trading.
My dad remembers his broker calling him up at various times and trying to get him to buy Apple because it was basically worthless (which is also why he didn't buy it).
Wouldn't have taken much to make a lot of money.
Of course, most people, even if that lucky, would have sold early iPod era thinking "This can't continue" and wouldn't have made the profits they would if they held until the last year or two.
What I really don't understand is why I didn't select the right lottery numbers at the last draw. I could have made millions.
You should only have regrets for decisions that would have made sense with the knowledge at that time. Buying Apple stock in the 90s wouldn't. But when I first saw an iphone, my first thought was "Wow, I need to buy one". My second thought then should have been "and I need to buy Apple's stock".
I bought some Apple stock in 2000 or so (then sold and re-bought it in 2001 when I switched brokerages). Maybe 7 or 8 years ago I put in a limit order to sell off some of it but it fortuitously expired. At this point, the annual dividend payout exceeds my purchase price.
I bought a bit of Apple stock in 2001, when it was in a rut after the dot-com crash... The next year, I sold the stock to buy a frigging 10GB iPod, of all things!
That might have been the world's most expensive iPod.
>My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
And how long would he have held on to them before selling?
That's the really fun part of trading: it's one thing to see a profit, and quite another to bet on whether it's as good as you're going to get, or go 5x - 10x - 100x higher.
Personally, I was planning to buy at $12 in the dark days when the Book Value was about Market Cap (~4B). Then it popped to 19ish, and I decided that the easy/big money was done.
There was a magazine called MacAddict which I'm sure some here would remember. One of their mid-90s Christmas gift recommendations was Apple stock! I sometimes wonder how many small fortunes those few paragraphs created.
I remember being in college and Apple stock was at $7. I had some money in an E-Trade account, but Apple was in such dire straits that I figured a better use for $7 was to buy lunch at Chick-Fil-A. There was a good chance the lunch would be around longer than Apple would! I don't even want to think about how much a couple thousand $$ of Apple stock would have been worth at its peak.
Mine, too. I was working my first appdev job at a startup in 1999, and as they talked about IPO and such I thought "apple, that would be some cool stock to own" based on my IIc nostalgia from school. I had no idea how to actually buy any at the time, though, and not a strong enough desire to pursue it further.
That $0.75/share price is already adjusted for the splits. So the stock price back in 1996 would have been around $20/share. So that's $200 in 1996 that would be ~$32k today. A 15000% return is still nothing to sneeze at and that's before you count the dividends they started issuing after Jobs died.
In 1995 my parents talked about letting me pick a couple hundred bucks of any stock as a high school graduation present. I loved our Mac LC and suggested Apple, but they never went through with it. I'm pretty sure they thought I would just be throwing the money away with that pick.
Eyeballing the chart, it would have been right around the last time they paid a dividend until 2012 and the stock price would have been around 1.5. Also, there were three stock splits between then and now.
Oh well, I probably would have lost track of the stock in the many many moves I made during my college years.
