The king is dead. Long live the king!
This is the chorus I imagine ringing through the halls at Apple Inc.‘s (NASDAQ: AAPL) corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California in the United States.
Listed on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Inc (NASDAQ: NDAQ), the Apple share price surged 10.5% on Friday. Investors piled in after the company’s third quarter results revealed revenue grew by an impressive 11% from the same quarter in 2019, among other numbers that beat analysts’ expectations.
That brings Apple’s year-to-date gains to 41.5%. And it lifts the company’s market capitalisation to an eye-popping US$1.84 trillion (AU$2.57 trillion).
The share price leap was enough to see Apple surpass Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco, which Bloomberg reports is worth US$1.76 trillion. The sharp gain was also enough to comfortably put Apple ahead of its customary sparring partner, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), with a current market cap of ‘merely’ US$1.55 trillion.
A lesson in long-term investing
Few blue chip companies offer a better lesson in the benefits of buying and holding quality shares for the long term than Apple.
Let’s go back 20 years, a decent timeline for long-term investors to hold onto quality stocks. On 4 August 2000, you could have bought Apple shares for US$3.38. Today, they are worth US$425.04. That’s a gain of 12,475%. And not from a highly speculative and high-risk micro cap, either.
Twenty years too long for you? How about 10 years? In August 2010, you could have picked up shares in Apple for US$34.50. Still, a very handy 1,132% gain at the current Apple share price.
And in after hours trading, the stock continues to edge higher, up 0.5% at time of writing.
Why you should look beyond the ASX
There are plenty of great Australian companies listed on the ASX. And you should certainly own a number of them in your diversified portfolio.
But ASX shares only make up some 2% of the total global market. If you limit yourself to shares on the ASX, you’re shutting out 98% of the investment opportunities available to you.
Most brokers, online and physical, now enable you to buy international shares more easily and at a lower cost than ever before. And if you want to own a piece of the world’s most valuable company before it potentially runs even higher, you’ll need to look offshore.
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More reading
- Apple smashes revenue forecasts
- US tech shares deliver massive results – what does it mean for ASX tech shares?
- Are the big US tech companies about to be broken up?
- ASX investors have been buying Tesla and these international shares
- Kanye West – ASX shares for his US presidential campaign
Teresa Kersten, an employee of LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Bernd Struben has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool Australia’s parent company Motley Fool Holdings Inc. owns shares of and recommends Apple and Microsoft and recommends the following options: long January 2021 $85 calls on Microsoft and short January 2021 $115 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool Australia has recommended Apple. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Scott Phillips.
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