Thursday, August 20, 2015

We Bought Apple Stocks: Apple Inc Nasdaq: AAPL


We bought a few thousand dollars worth of Apple stocks (Nasdaq: AAPL) on 23rd July this year. (Sorry have had to edit some figures out due to privacy issues, ironic given this is a public blog =) )

My first direct international stock purchase and what an experience. The amount of paperwork that I had to complete just to get to that stage. 

I won't even mention that I wanted to buy Google Class A stocks but due to the broker stuffing up, I didn't get my order executed before their price kicked up after reporting positive results. Sigh. $16k worth of profits and gains down the drain.

Why did we buy Apple and want to buy Google? Those two stocks have always been on my to-do and to-buy list for years and years! If we had bought them years ago, we would have been multi-millionaires from just holding two stocks. This guy I once knew(let's call him Mr Cantankerous because he really is cranky and a cantankerous type of guy) shared his opinion with me, saying that he believes Apple Inc has had its heydays and the glory days are pretty much over.

My opinion is that this is still early days yet for technology. Apple and Google are well placed for future technological development and they both have such good business models for producing revenues and future growth potential from innovations. They create their own market simply due to their mammoth size and the free marketing they both receive. I could launch into the technicalities but let's leave that for another day before this post is too long.

Apple is the largest capitalised stock in the world at $655 billion. With over 200 billion dollars in cash savings. Cash savings! Ridiculously good savings. Now if only shareholders can all unite and request a special dividend...

Being an international stock for us, there are two market forces at play affecting returns. 
1) The stocks' price volatility (AAPL stock prices swinging up and down)
2) The foreign currency volatility (AUD weakening and strengthening against the USD)

I'm not one to be concerned about any of these short term fluctuations. In the long run, Apple is innovative just like Google, the history of these two companies having split their stock several times over the years is ample evidence. A pessimist would be at this point saying that history is not indicative of future performance, that is certainly true. However, after having regretted not buying either Apple nor Google over these years on multiple occasions, I am over regrets and will roll the dice on buying these two stocks this year.

Seriously $200 billion in cash savings which exceeds the GDP of Peru and the Czech Republic, it exceeds the total net worth of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma and Warren Buffet combined (cnbc.com 2015). I'll be happy to sit on our Apple stocks for the long run and see where it takes us. I've never been the type to dwell on short term volatility in stocks or the property market if I'm not day trading or in the business of trading properties. I am all about the long run and the next 30 years. This strategy has worked very well for us across both asset classes over the past few years. 




Currently AAPL'S chart is not looking illustrious(see above price chart) =) but it's a long term holding for us that we have added to our portfolio. I'll keep readers posted on its performance and how it is going for SMG with the two market forces at play. 

The United States is heading into a monetary policy tightening cycle (raising rates) so the AUD will be crumbling further as investors switch back to the greenback. There will be interesting days ahead =) 

The dividend yield for AAPL is rather low, however we are pursuing capital gains and not dividend yield. That's the goal with this AAPL acquisition =)




No comments:

Post a Comment