News Christie's First Byte auction generates interest

$300,000 Apple-1 the jewel in the crown.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/06/27/christies-first-byte/1

 

I'm procrastinating like a... I dunno, something well known for procrastination. Student. Yeah, that'll do. I'm procrastinating like a student here, so have a little stream-of-consciousness calculation I just did by way of bonus content:

Assuming that it's the original owner who is auctioning off the Apple-1, and that it sells for $300,000 with no more bids in the next couple of weeks, the owner will have turned $666.66 into $300,000 - at first glance, a profit of $299,333.34.

However, there's inflation to take into account. Since the Apple-1 launched in 1976, the value of the US dollar has inflated by 309.4% - meaning $666.66 in 1976 cash is equivalent to $2,562.63 today. This gives a total profit of $297,437.37. Still not exactly a bad return for buying a computer and keeping it in good condition for a few decades.

I'm sure at least some of you will have seen the "how rich would you be if you'd bought Apple shares instead of a MacBook/iPod/Lisa/Whatever," so let's see how that would affect our seller. Apple went public in 1980 for $22 a share - so $666.66 would have got the seller 30 shares plus change for lunch. Today, those shares would be worth $11,955 - a fraction of the profit the seller is going to make on this auction, given that he or she is already guaranteed to sell it for at least $300,000 and Christie's takes its fees from the buyer.

The IPO wasn't the best time to buy Apple shares, however: on Thursday the 8th of July 1982, a good couple of years before the company would hit the headlines with the launch of the Macintosh, shares reached an all-time low of $1.39 - losing those who had bought during the 1980 IPO a whopping 93.7 per cent of their investment. If our savvy buyer had waited until then, he or she could have bought 479 shares with change. Assuming the buyer didn't panic when Sculley 'encouraged' Steve Jobs to leave, and the company floundered until his return, he or she could sell those shares today for $190,881.50 - still below the profit from this auction.

Just as the IPO wasn't the best time to buy Apple shares, however, today isn't the best time to sell them. The company's highest recorded share price was a whopping $702.10 on the 19th of September 2012. Had our seller some form of psychic talent when it came to the stock market, he or she could have sold those 479 shares for an impressive $336,305.90 - finally eclipsing the profit from the auction.

Given that, in order for that to happen, the collection owner would have had to bought on exactly the right day and sold on exactly the right day, I can't recommend this as a means of getting rich. Instead, I'm going to sit and stare at my boxed Sinclair ZX81s, and imagine a future where a journalist is writing about how Christie's is offering an 'immaculate' example for sale at just £1.5 million...

EDIT: Either way, it's better than a bank account: had the mysterious owner stuck his $666.66 in a 3% interest savings account, 37 years of compound interest would leave him or her with just $2,020.09 to show for it.

TL;DR: When I'm in this mood, I'll do almost anything except the work I'm supposed to be doing.

 

I'm *special.*

 

It would have an effect, yes, but not a major one: $666.66 isn't a massive amount of money to invest in a company like Apple. Even when that cash would have got the buyer nearly 500 shares, it certainly wouldn't have made him or her a majority shareholder nor given Apple the cash it would need to dig itself out of a hole. The IPO, which sold out at $22 a share, released 4.6 million shares - meaning that, if our buyer had waited until Apple's lowest ebb to pick up 479 shares, he or she would have purchased just 0.01 per cent of the company's stock - nowhere near enough to make the stock value differ in any serious amount.

Always. Never throw anything away. Ever. Why risk it?

I have my moments.