Thursday, May 14, 2015: $128.95 +2.94 (2.33%) Dividend Paid
May 15, 2015 9:28:21 GMT -8
Luckychoices likes this
Post by 4aapl on May 15, 2015 9:28:21 GMT -8
Wow!!!
Congrats!
It's already wonderful to know that so many others here have also done well over the years, but it's great to see that someone with some saving and income in hand was able to go into investing in Apple with enough conviction to do so well.
Actually that sounds very close to what I did. While my first individual stock investment was $5k into AAPL in Jan '98, that was the time that everything was going up, and many headed up more than AAPL, including several tech companies that went up 10x in one year. I didn't own them, but everything was on the upswing as I'm sure you remember. So I owned a few other things, picking up AMD after interviewing with them and having the employees so excited because they just got the K6 ramped up (forget if that was public knowledge or not, and if that was the Austin site or Santa Clara, since I interviewed at both). I had some 3com, expecting to make a good gain on the spinoff of palm. Starbucks. I think most others were post crash.
Then late 2000 hit. I had picked up the margin habit after a few months of investing, and that was great while things were going up....
Like you, my account shrank by a mid-6 figure level. Being on margin, I fought to hold onto some of my AAPL shares, selling just about everything else. And getting my first taste of options, though that time as a way to carry forward a loss while I moved back to CA.
After that, getting good money as a contractor and eventually getting ESPP shares at AAPL, I saved a lot and plowed it in. At some point I started using more options, though I had other great companies like Pixar there for a while. But I still used margin to some extent, and increased options purchases to large amounts.
At some point, after being crushed (I've had 85% declines a few times) yet again due to continued risky margin/option habits, I ended up selling just about everything else and being a "just AAPL" portfolio. But along the way we've bought a couple houses in cash, and still have a few 401k plans in other things here and there, so we have some safety nets.
That said, we're 30+ years your junior, with 3 young kids, so we have a few more responsibilities to look forward to. I don't want to get crushed again, and wouldn't want to ever start from scratch again. This time around our margin % is much lower, though it's basically equivalent to what our mortgage should be though at a 1.5% rate instead of 4.25%. And we're living off less than 2% of our portfolio, so the dividends are in fact paying the bills. But on the turbulent ride we've taken, I will be diversifying soon. That likely won't mean even getting AAPL down to the 20% level anytime soon, but a goal of 50% along with less margin by the time the rates start hiking up would be good for the next few years.
I've seen or heard of too many people that made their money in one stock, and then couldn't diversify over the years. This included my grandmother, who at 96 showed me her account info with the MSFT stock she loved. It was the hometown hero and made her a lot of money, but it's been relatively flat for something like 15 years now. It's nice that the stepped up basis went into the estate, but I'm pretty sure the kids would have loved splitting an amount 10+x that if I had managed to convince here to roll it over sometime into AAPL.
While I don't expect Apple to flatline anytime soon, I've seen enough to not be completely surprised if the stock was to lag the market. It shouldn't with 40% YOY earnings gains, but if those slipped to 25%, the P/E could take a long slide from 18 (where it will likely be this year) down to 10, and that can flatline the stock even as the company continues to grow.
If you ever feel you want to stop giving CA such a big chunk (or more importantly, if you were going to switch investments in your trust and have a large couple of tax years), and move up here to NV just 3 hours away, feel free to contact me. But truthfully, if our dividends were a few times greater, and I and the 3 kids weren't loving skiing 60 days a season, we'd be back down in the bay area again too.
With having to transfer stock from my IRAs yearly to satisfy RMD and, over this last year, sell stock to fund a major remodel, I can't afford to have any bigger large tax years.
It sounds like you've found a great place to raise your kids. Not likely for us to move there because of the family we have in this area, but I would like to maybe meet for lunch sometime if my wife and I are ever in your neck of the woods. Apple investors are likely to have a lot to talk about.
We like it up here, but like a very large percentage of the people in our town, a big draw is having no state income tax. A neighbor that moved his business here said the savings paid his mortgage. We're about at the point where the savings has paid for our first house. While I'm often tempted to move back to CA where I grew up, especially thinking forward 10 years about the UC system for our kids, the up to 13.9% tax rate is a bit of a disincentive.
Tell you what, I haven't been to an AAPL shareholder's meeting in years. I'll meet you there next year, assuming it's not in the middle of a blizzard with epic skiing.