When the iPhone was announced, RIM was trading at just under $50/share. It's now trading at ~$35, its lowest point since. To realize that gain, you would have had to hold your short position in RIM for over 4 years.

Alternatively, if you believed in the iPhone, why not just invest in Apple? Their stock has risen 300% over that same period.

+1

Good luck spotting the next iPhone. It wasn't exactly a given that the iPhone was going to be a success. And if you remove the recession, MSFT hasn't really moved it's just stagnent. Same for RIM from what I can see EDIT: I was wrong on rim they went to 100 bucks in 2008 but quickly dropped back to 40-50 range where they are now. I was looking at 2007 where they were in the same range.

Point of order: Shorting is a bit more complicated than just a "anti-buy". If you short a stock, and it goes up, then you owe your broker money. This is called a "margin call", and if you will recall, it was what bankrupted the Duke brothers in Trading Places.

If you shorted a stock at $50, covered your margins up to $100, and waited another three years to close out your position at $35, either you have testicular elephantiasis, or a goddamn crystal ball.

This is why we have put options.

I think it was pretty obvious that the iPhone was going to be a huge success. It's one reason why Microsoft's board is negligent in keeping Ballmer as CEO. If it was obvious to me that the entire cell phone industry (or at least the only profitable part of it) was being turned on its head, it should've been even more obvious to Ballmer, Lazaridis, and other key industry executives.

The iPad, though, was a different story. I knew I wanted a giant iPod Touch as soon as the iPhone came out, but when the iPad was finally announced I wasn't sure if they were going to sell 2,000 of them or 20,000,000. To this day I think my uncertainty was defensible, because unlike phones there was no existing mass market.

If you think Alan Kay had any vision and market sense whatsoever, you might have guessed they'd do well (this was the day before the iPad was to be released):

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/26/alan-kay-with-the-tablet-apple-...

  I think it was pretty obvious that the iPhone was going to 
  be a huge success. 

There's more 20/20 hindsight in this thread than a rear-view mirror convention. Could you please furnish the public statement you made four years ago where you asserted the doom of all the market leaders, or failing that, brokerage documents showing your massive investment in Apple Inc in 2007?

I didn't assert anyone's doom. At the time I assumed that everybody interested in the smartphone business, not just Apple, was heading in the same obvious direction.

Jobs' boast about being three years ahead of everyone else sounded like empty hype, and Ballmer's public assertion that the iPhone would never gain significant market share sounded like strategic misdirection.

I'm not going to post any trade confirmations, but I did buy some AAPL in response to the iPhone announcement, thinking it was a good way for the company to leverage its existing strengths in UX design. Should've bought more, but hey, it was AAPL, and the conventional wisdom at the time went something like, "What kind of moron would put a lot of money into AAPL?"

I don't lay claim to any magical insight, and that's the whole point of my post.