Re:Bogleheads
by perl4ever on Sunday August 02, 2020 @02:09AM
(#24026713)
>It’s not that hard. AAPL and AMZN have outperformed the market for 15-20 years
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.
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.