Bought first stock
With my steady employment at SLU we had finally escaped paycheck-to-paycheck living. Student loans weren’t yet coming due, and for the first time in my emancipated life I felt like I had wealth, however modest.
Not much, mind you, but enough that I could ask myself “what do adults do with their money” and decided to invest in Apple Computer, Inc.
Why Apple? I was familiar with the company and followed with curiousity. They had recently fended off acquisition from Sun, and with the return of Steve Jobs had released the iMac and announced investment from Microsoft. When I learned that their market capitalization was sometimes dipping below their assets, it seemed like a pretty safe bet that maybe the suits on Wall Street just didn’t understand.
So I took around $900 to a brokerage office and bought 28 shares of AAPL, which I recieved as a paper certificate.
In 2022 as I write this, that would have split to 3136 shares, worth almost $450,000. Unfortunately, I didn’t hold it for that long, but I did still have it when I started more actively trading AAPL in 2005. Most of the time I’ve sold, it’d been to fund purchasing property.