Legendary investor Peter Lynch has a winning investing track record, but he still has regrets for not buying Apple shares when they were cheap.
Lynch famously managed Fidelity’s Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990 during which time the fund earned an annualized return of 29.2%, consistently more than doubling the performance of the S&P 500.
The former Fidelity Magellan fund manager revealed Tuesday that he wished he hadn’t missed out on the explosive growth in Apple.
“Apple was not that hard to understand. I mean, how dumb was I?” Lynch, vice chairman of Fidelity Management & Research, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Apple has a “nice balance sheet. I should have done some work on Apple… it’s not a complicated company.”
Lynch recounted how his daughter had bought an iPod for $250 at the time and how he recalled thinking Apple was making a high margin on it. Yet he didn’t buy the stock.
Lynch, 79, acknowledged that Warren Buffett saw Apple’s potential and capitalized on it. The “Oracle of Omaha” had shied away from tech stocks for decades, claiming they were outside of his expertise. But under the influence of his investing lieutenants, he bought into Apple in 2016 and made it his single biggest holding in his portfolio.
MacDailyNews Take: Those who have iron stomachs in the face of risk, year after year, can make millions of dollars with relatively very little invested, if they go “all in” on the right company long term.
Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing. – Warren Buffett
On December 20, 1996, when Apple announced the acquisition of NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs, an Apple share sold for 18-cents.*
As recently as April 2003, Apple shares sold for 20-cents each.* Even on January 07, 2019, Apple closed at just $35.64*!
Anyone who invested in AAPL, even in later years, without the loss-making hedges in the name of diversification, sports an incredibly better annualized return than “legendary investor” Peter Lynch’s 29.2% (which is rather laughably weak when viewed by long-term, mainly AAPL investors).
The actual “legendary investors” would be those who began buying AAPL upon the return of Steve Jobs, never stopped buying AAPL year after year, reinvested dividends in AAPL every quarter, never wasted money on diversification in the name of mitigating risk (which also, in the absence of investing perfection (which does not exist), mitigates profit), but who instead went all in on AAPL and never sold a share.
*Prices adjusted for splits and dividend distributions.
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