If you stuck with both of those for 20 years and didn't get distracted by anything else, good for you.
However, it's hard for me to believe someone who is old enough to be investing 20 years ago and followed their ups and downs would call it easy.
Most of what I've learned in my entire life about investing is from not putting everything I could in Apple stock and trying to think honestly about why that is.
It certainly wasn't obvious to me and I think most people circa 2000 that either AMZN or AAPL would become trillion dollar companies. Jobs and Bezos weren't considered gods yet. The dot-com crash meant that Amazon looked like another not-quite-dead-yet victim staggering around. Apple had yet to invent any of the things that make up most of its business now.
When Apple opened the iTunes store, in 2003, that's when I believed in them...briefly. But when they broke out of their historical range, I figured, that's it, and never imagined they would keep on going.
And after years of not believing in or liking Jobs, not liking OS X, etc., when he died, it made sense to me to assume Apple would collapse without him. After all, that's what happened the first time he left.
So it's easier for me to believe that someone who says it wasn't that hard to predict the last 20 years just is lying about living through it. But of course that's self serving of me - maybe you could explain how you kept the faith through everything that happened.
I would say that it's true that performance of a stock like Apple persists for many years, so it sounds wrong to say you can't predict it. But the trouble is, when you don't have the benefit of hindsight, you have to again predict it will continue every day of every year for all those years.
Good on you for identifying their value at the time and getting rich, but it's not something everyone can do.
That combined with their world class ability to execute made magic.
People buy and sell houses all of the time and find ways to make money. It’s no different with securities, and the bizarre position that responsible investing for individuals consists of being actively ignorant is gross.
Index investing is a valid, useful tool. It should not be a quasi-religion.
But you have to realize you're essentially saying "Why can't everyone be better than average?" It's great thing to aspire to but most people won't be better than average. Anyone can, everyone can't.
Unlike the 90s technology improvements are benefiting a small number of entities.
That's been a 'tradition' for a long time:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/07/the-nifty-fifty-and...
* https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2018/11/26/the-nifty-fifty...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nifty_Fifty
* https://etfdb.com/history-of-the-s-and-p-500/
* https://www.qad.com/blog/2019/10/sp-500-companies-over-time
It's just that which companies have been the top 20% has changed over the decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-...
You can also easily see this in the reduced bargaining power of the bottom 3 to 4 quintiles of the American people, as evidenced by their stagnating or declining pay and higher volatility in the demand for their labor.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-...
My portfolio of 5-6 stocks + cash has beat any Boglehead portfolio, and has for decades now with a minimum investment in time. No bonds except for GNMA 15-20 years ago.
It’s not that hard. AAPL and AMZN have outperformed the market for 15-20 years.