| Company Name: Apple, Inc | Stock Symbol: AAPL | Industry: Technology/PC |
| Percent Appreciation: 3,700% | Number of Bags: 37 | Holding Period: 11 Years |
| Entry Date & Price: May, 2003 @$2.50 share | Exit Date & Price: Current ($95/share) | Original Investment($10,000): $370,000 |
Company Description: Apple Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiaries design, manufacture, and market mobile communication and media devices, personal computers, and portable digital music players worldwide. It also sells software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications related to its products. The company offers iPhone, a line of smartphones that comprise a phone, music player, and Internet device; iPad, a line of multi-purpose tablets based on Apple’s iOS Multi-Touch operating system; Mac, a line of desktop and portable personal computers; and iPod, a line of portable digital music and media players, such as iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, and iPod classic.
Quick Trading Overview & Objective: Apple’s ups and downs over the last three decades are very well known and it would be impossible to account for all of its trading/investing history in this short overview. For our purposes, we will concentrate on Apple’s latest stock rally initiating in April of 2003. At that time, Apple’s stock set a multi years low of $1.87 a share. A low unseen since 1982. It was at that juncture that the stock proceeded to bottom and then kick off a massive multi-year rally of 3,700% (as of 7/8/2014 @$95).
We will now go back in time and take an in depth look at the company in order to determine if we could have taken a long position at that time. More importantly, we will look at Apple’s fundamental/trading patterns over the last 11-12 years to ascertain if we would have been able to maintain our position over an entire period.
FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS:
Apple’s story cannot be told without first concentrating on its founder and the driving force behind the company, Steve Jobs. As you probably know, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, only to return as Apple’s CEO in 1997. It was at that point that “Chapter 2” in Apple’s history began. Steve was able to bring the company back from its near death experience by introducing a number of popular PC’s, cutting costs and securing a large investment from Microsoft. Immediate after his return Apple’s stock price started to surge, appreciating close to 1,000%, by March of 2000(A Tenbagger in 2.5 years) . Then, the Nasdaq crashed and so did Apple’s stock price. Going from $20 a share to $2 a share in a matter of 9 months.
To be continued tomorrow…..
