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Clem Chambers, CEO of ADVFN, the leading stocks & shares website

If you had bought Apple shares on 5 December 2014, you would be right back where you started from as I write a year later.

You would have also seen the price as high as $132 and as low as $92. A $40-a-share range is the sort of volatility that can be nerve-wracking for any investor but imagine if you were one of those people that bought a few thousand dollars of stock in Apple at its pre-resurrection lows of around 20¢ and are still holding. That $5,000 position is now worth $2.9m.

This year that position would have flown to $3.3m, then slumped to $2.3m and gone back to be worth $2.9m again. You would have to be either extremely rich or cold-blooded for that to not give you stomach ulcers.

This is the lot of anybody who puts all their money in a single company’s stock, which is why the golden rule of investing is to diversify. But, of course, most people do not do that.