This article is the latest in a series that aims to help novice investors with the stock market. To enjoy past articles in the series, please visit our full archive.
The Beginners’ Portfolio is a virtual portfolio, with all costs, spreads and dividends accounted for. Transactions are for educational purposes only and do not constitute advice to buy or sell.
There’s an old rule-of-thumb amongst long-term investors that says as long as we are happy with a company’s fundamental performance, we should take advantage of short-term panics to buy up shares cheap.
So when Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL.US) revealed a mere 18% rise in revenue for the quarter ending December, and a record quarterly profit that was only a little up on the same period last year, I watched the resulting fall in the share price and pounced.
Apple shares were added to the Beginners’ Portfolio at a buy price of $458.40.
The end of growth?
Then came Apple’s first-quarter results for 2013, and for the first time in a decade, profits fell, by 18% to £6.3 billion. And the share price today? Well, its down to $417.20, for a fall of 9% since our purchase. So was it a mistake to add the shares to the portfolio? Let’s consider a few things…
For the quarter, revenue actually rose 11% compared to the same period a year ago, but it was falling gross margins that did the damage to profits — 37.5% this time, compared to 47.4% a year ago, and pundits are expecting around 35% going forward.
But Apple did manage to shift 37.4 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads during the quarter, and though Mac sales dropped 2%, that’s against a general fall in sales of conventional PCs of 14%.
Don’t forget the income
For years, Apple has resisted paying any dividends, instead building up a huge cash mountain to use for whatever new idea came along. And though many saw Apple as a perpetual growth company, rational folk know there is no such thing. In fact, the introduction of a dividend was a major sign that a shift towards becoming a mature company with a new focus on providing income was in progress — and at the end of the day, it’s only that eventual potential income that gives any growth company its value.
The quarterly dividend has now been hiked by a very nice 15%, to $3.05 per share, and that alone represents a 3% yield over the full year. But it’s not the end of it — Apple intends to return a total of $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015, partly through a big rise in its share buyback programme from $10 billon to $60 billion.
Apple shares are on a price to earnings (P/E) ratio of only around 10, which is way down from a five-year high of nearly 40, and that provides even more evidence to me that the shares are currently priced as a long-term income-paying investment — and that’s no bad thing.
You may not be surprised to learn, then, that I’m still happy for the portfolio to hold Apple shares, because I do think it will be a nicely profitable investment over the next decade or two.
The timing
But I do have one doubt — whether it was wise to dive in just after the 2012 Q4 results, or whether I should have waited another quarter or two. With hindsight, I could have got in at a better price had I waited. But over the 20 years or so that I’ve been investing in shares, one thing I have become convinced of is that trying to time your investments is a mug’s game.
So I got shares that I think were a bargain, even though they went on to become a bigger bargain. I can live with that.
