If you'd bought 100 shares of Microsoft 25 years ago... | Hacker News Reader

If you'd bought 100 shares of Microsoft 25 years ago...

networkworld.com

19 pointsbuzzblog11 comments

I really, really hate this kind of thinking: "I should have bought stock X 10 years ago..."

There are companies out there right now whose stock will balloon like this in the next 25 years. Go buy those stocks today.

Oh wait...it's not that easy to see into the future. It's much easier to use our 20/20 hindsight and dream about what might have been.

If only you had bought a lottery ticket with today's winning numbers yesterday! You would be a multi-millionaire.

I completely agree, its a silly thing to dwell on what you didn't do but if you had you would really have benefited from it.

Anyone remember a really old free game that came on floppies (5.25")? I think it was from BusinessWeek and came out around 1989. You ran Microsoft for 5 years and tried to maximize your profits (or share value).

I remember that the best I could do was cut all their product (Word, Excel, Windows, DOS, ?) prices to the bare minimum ($8-20) for a year or two, lock up market share, then jack the prices the $500-1000 range. I thought it was pretty unrealistic at the time.

Hasn't Microsoft stock paid out a decent amount in dividends since 1999?

Yes, in particular a massive dividend in Nov 2004 of $3.08 / share. That was after every stock split, so that adds another $87,552.

"Gates earned a mere $1.6 million for shares he sold that day, but his remaining 45% stake in the company was worth $350 million, instantly making him one of the nation's 100 wealthiest individuals."

I'm surprised. I thought that, even in 85-86, you needed like a billion to crack that list.

It turns out you only needed $150 million to make the Forbest 400 in 1985 (the equivalent of around $310 million today): http://tinyurl.com/4sjgdbh

These days it takes a billion: http://tinyurl.com/4ggvbak

Oracle would have gone from $1500 to $259,200. About 23% annual gains. Microsoft was 26.5% annually.

$21 was the actual IPO price, not adjusted for the 9 splits.

Which is why they clearly state:

If you had the good fortune to have bought 100 shares at the $21 offering price that day and sat on the investment for 25 years, it would have mushroomed into 28,800 shares over the course of nine stock splits and be worth about three quarters of a million dollars today.

The real joy is if you bought 100 shares of Microsoft then, and switched teams to Apple around 1999 or 2000.

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