A Fruitless Flub

I bought 1,000 shares of Apple a month before the first iPhone was released. The stock went up to approximately $178. After some time, it started going down, and I dumped it around $125. Big dummy. — N., online

The Fool Responds: Ouch. We hear from many people whose biggest investing regret is selling shares of Apple. In your case, your 1,000 shares would have split into 7,000 shares in 2014 and would have been worth more than $1 million at recent prices.

Don’t kick yourself too much, though, as most long-time investors have made costly blunders — and many of those moves seemed quite reasonable at the time. After all, for many years Apple was a disappointment in the computing realm, with admired offerings but a paltry market share. There was no way to know for sure that the iPhone would be a massive hit. It was the same with other huge moneymakers for the company, such as the iPod, iPad and App Store.

Few would have guessed that Apple would go on to have the highest market capitalization in the world. (Its market cap was recently $763 billion, well ahead of No. 2 — Google parent Alphabet, at $674 billion.)

As investors, we need to research and know our investments well, and hang on to them when we feel confident that they are healthy and growing. If you weren’t bullish on Apple, you were right to sell.