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Brett Arends' ROI
May 18, 2010, 5:38 a.m. EDT · Recommend (3) · Post:
View all Brett Arends' ROI "º
"¹ Previous Column
Little guy pays the price for BP disaster
First Take "º
A spoonful of inflation helps the medicine go down
By Brett Arends, WSJ.com and MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- You've already heard about "the greatest trade ever" - hedge fund manager John Paulson's giant score betting against subprime mortgage bonds.
But no one's told you about the dumbest trade ever.
Sure, there are plenty of contenders.
But this one is a doozy.
Reuters Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs.
It's got everything. Fame. Glamour. The exactly wrong trade at exactly the wrong time. Billions of dollars blown.
And you won't believe who pulled it.
No, it wasn't some semi-pro hedge fund manager in Greenwich. An obscure European banker. Or a crazy trader in Hong Kong.
You ready?
It was Steve Jobs.
Yes, the man who walks on water. The same genius who invented the iPhone, restored balance to the Force, and rescued Morpheus from the Matrix.
Steve - Luke - "Neo" - Jobs.
"The One."
Everybody knows that Apple Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 257.77, +3.55, +1.40%) stock has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks to the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the forthcoming edible iPod Shuffle. A look through the company's proxy shows Jobs is holding a fistful of valuable paper, as you'd expect. He has 10 million shares. At the latest prices, around $250 each, that's made him a thumping $2.5 billion.
What isn't so widely known is that it was so nearly more. A lot more.
Let's go back in time.
Brett Arends is an award-winning financial columnist with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance in Europe and the U.S. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co. He is a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) and Accredited Asset Management Specialist (AAMS). His latest book, "Storm Proof Your Money," has just been published by John Wiley & Co.
In today's upside-down economic world, the U.K.'s latest report of inflation at 3.7% for April is no big deal. Here's why, and what it means for the rest of Europe.
53 min ago9:03 a.m. May 18, 2010 | Comments: 1
- Bastiat | 1:10 a.m. Today1:10 a.m. May 18, 2010
"Apple's Jobs blunders on options swap http://on.mktw.net/a9GaGS" 11:28 p.m. EDT, May 17, 2010 from MKTWArends
"Little guy pays the price for BP disaster http://on.mktw.net/94aYvp" 12:04 a.m. EDT, May 11, 2010 from MKTWArends
"Why everyone's afraid of Apple http://on.mktw.net/aZzxNQ" 11:46 p.m. EDT, May 3, 2010 from MKTWArends
"Never put too much faith in a Wall Street bank http://on.mktw.net/aBc1Zb" 1:18 p.m. EDT, May 3, 2010 from MKTWArends
"Portfolio for the truly paranoid http://on.mktw.net/bNq02U" 11:35 p.m. EDT, April 26, 2010 from MKTWArends
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