Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Peabody, Here. Let's step in the Wayback Machine...



If you could go back 10 years in time. what would you do?

Bet on a Superbowl? Relive a great point in your life, make subtle or enormous changes, hoping to make your present life a little better?

Well, Sherman. Dr. Peabody here, let's step into the Wayback Machine and head to the year 2000 and see what this 'kicking myself in the ass for the last 10 years buffoon' would do....

I'd buy Apple stock for $7 a share.
Spend $1000 and get roughly 143 shares. Apple was hurting at the time, and had been for most of the 90s.. Steve Jobs had been ousted during the late 80s and most of the 90s, but was back at Apple trying to get them back to their roots: iNnovation.

Apple stock split in April, 2001. It was the year of the first iPod and iMac.

Apple stock split again in Feb, 2005.

Apple was back and kicking some ass. We now had multiple versions of the iPod, some that even shot video, the iPhone, and the iMacs just got better and sleeker through each model revision.

My family of 3 owns 3 iPods of various models, a big, honkin' iMac, 3 older retired macs in the basement that date as far back as 1991 (and they still work-more for nostalgia's sake "Oooh, that II-ci kicks butt with a whopping 40 MB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM" Amazing that I was running Photoshop and Quark Xpress on it and doing quite impressive work, if I do say so). I work on a Mac Pro tower at work, and it's a pleasure to use.

Today, with the introduction of the iPad, each share is worth 207.78.
If I'd have bought that initial 1000 bucks worth of stock, it would be worth $118,850.16 today.

AND, if I'd been just a bit braver, and taken out a loan for 5k I'd have started with 714 shares of stock, and would now have stock worth over half a million ($593,419.68). Crap, I could be working part time doing something less stressful and using the dividend checks to help supplement my income.

Good story on the 'Decade of Jobs' here:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/04/technology/steve_jobs_ceo_decade.fortune/index.htm

I'd work on creating an ass-kicking machine right now, but someone's beaten me to that, too...


2 comments:

Jody said...

Great post! I need to kick my arse too. General Dynamics stock was down to a rock bottom low of $38/share last Spring, and it is back up to $70 now. It will go back up to the 120's and then it will split... It always does, but rarely does it go below $40. (sigh). It is just hard to take the risk. Hind sight is 20/20.

Smackiepipe said...

If it weren't for hindsight I'd have no sight at all!