Apples Record High

Today Apple is at $247, so I've made a 72% profit on shares I bought in January at $144. The only problem is I'll need to wait a couple months to sell, so I can pay low long-term gain taxes. But if it drops before then, I'll just buy more. Win-win.

This is about the fifth or sixth time I've done this with Apple (usually making more like 30%). It'd be a great return even for a speculative biotech stock (I still own some SIGA, btw, and will sell the next time it rises ahead of the next isolated bit of good news). But you're not supposed to get that sort of return with a blue chip stock. Blue chips are supposed to be safe and sturdy. For high returns, you're supposed to need to take risks. I keep making tons of profit for very little risk. And, yet, I feel all alone. I don't know - haven't heard or read about - anyone else plying this rather obvious strategy. I think it's too simple.

Most investors have smart theories and slick moves I barely understand. Me, I just see the most successful company in history constantly manipulated by fear-mongers, and while shorts and hedgies make millions from the periodic manipulation, I keep making thousands riding effortlessly along the other way with extremely low risk - the risk of a company with hundreds of billions of cash on-hand, which makes products everyone adores, and does what it does with vision and integrity. Blue-chip risk!

Apple will not keep boosting to new highs forever and ever. So while one day I'll fail to profit, I don't see how I'd lose my shirt. The next plunge won't go to zero. A disappointing product or a tariff or a manufacturing snafu cannot sink the company. I once wrote:

That cash hoard alone - which doesn't even do anything! - dwarfs the total market value of all but seven other corporations. Apple could throw their entire mega-successful business in the garbage and buy Starbucks, Boeing, and Goldman Sachs. If customers update their iPads more slowly than expected, or a phone antenna doesn't work properly, or a new product line undersells expectations, that's just not going to cause a death spiral. I'm not saying they'll be dominant forever...but the downside of buying at Apple's inevitable 30% bullish downturns strikes me as minimal.

The rationality of this observation is too quiet and simple for investment geniuses to parse. But I learned early in life the power of guileless clunk.