Let us pretend for a moment that the year is 1997 and you’re in the market for a new laptop computer. You want the top-of-the-line product at the time, so you opt for the newly released Apple Computer PowerBook G3 250 laptop. This revolutionary piece of technology, which comes with a 250-megahertz processor and a whopping 5 gigabytes of storage, will set you back $5,700.
If you held onto that laptop until today you would probably be able to sell it on eBay for about $50.
Now imagine that instead of buying the Apple PowerBook in 1997, you decided to spend $5,700 on Apple stock. You would have done a little better. Indeed, today your Apple stock would be worth $330,563. Probably makes you think twice buying about that laptop.
Here’s the complete list.
What?
That’s the conventional wisdom. Be careful of conventional wisdom on companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google.
Apple wasn’t all that great. My dad bought us kids an Apple 2 in 1978. He saw how much he we liked it so when the IPO came, he bought 100 shares of AAPL. That dog did nothing for 18 years. Dad died in 2002 and at the recommendation of the broker, we sold it for about $26 or so, just about what he paid I think.
So we were supposed to wait 30 years for this dog to finally get hot?
Don’t get too wrapped up in all this coulda/shoulda/woulda junk. I tried investing in the tech stocks (WD/Intel/NSM/Cisco/MSFT) and hardly even broke even on this junk before I understood what the markets are really about.
Yeah, with this hindsight I would have bought the hot software companies instead of hardware makers and old line software, but who the hell knew who they were.
The stock market is just a means of transferring the capital of suckers (investors) to the those who skim (brokers), steal (fund mgrs) and manipulate (traders) the markets.
There is no get rich quick for the suckers. If you want some economic advice, get out of the markets, get out of the dollar, and put your cash into tangible things like land, silver, gold etc.
I have a web site where I research penny stocks and stocks under five dollars . I have many years of experience with these type of stocks. I can not believe that apple computers shares traded at just 5 dollars in 1998 the stock trades at 350 dollars a share today. their are many stocks trading today that once traded under 5 dollars. this is just one of many examples.
I would like to comment about apple computer. I cannot believe that apple computer trades at 400 dollars a share. The stock traded at 5 dollars a share in 1998. This goes to show you that their are stocks trading under five dollar even stocks trading under two dollars. Ane once in a very great while pink sheets stocks and over the counter bulletin board stocks that turn out to be really great buys.