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.
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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.
