A brief history of a decade’s worth of buying Apple (and why it matters today)

The emails have been flooding in from you guys who bought Apple before its most recent breakout, and many of you used options, magnifying the move.  Here’s what I wrote just a few short days ago:

Here comes the Apple breakout

July 1, 2012, 1:49 PM

It’s time to buy Apple again.  I’ve been saying that Apple is going to $1000 by 2015 for more than three years now, since the stock was a small fraction of its current quote.

And here’s the Apple options trade I was telling my TradingWithCody.com subscribers about the week of June 25th:

Options:
Stock CALL or PUT Action Date Initiated Stock Price Strike Price Exp Date
AAPL – Apple CALL Buy 6/29/2012 $577.90 $650 to $700 Jan-13

Right now I think the biggest hurdle many of you have about buying Apple is its history.  Traders tend to want to be the smartest guy or gal in the room because that’s what they’ve been for most of their life.

Tell me if  any of this sounds familiar. If you’re not finding a spectacularly under-covered stock, you think it’s automatically a covered trade.  You cringe at buying a stock because it looks like everyone else already owns it. When you watch CNBC or Bloomberg or Fox Business you snicker when analysts talk-up Dow components.  And you really, really, really hate buying a stock that is up thousands of percent in the last ten years.

I’m telling you right now to ignore all your instincts, you’re falling prey to human bias. Think of Apple at these levels as a base for the next decade.  It is now a value stock and you want to buy it before the cash hoard goes from $100 billion to $500 billion, something I think will happen in the next five years.

Just because everyone owns some kind of idevice doesn’t mean the Apple story is over.  Buying Apple in the $500-600’s today is going to look like a crazy smart move five to ten years from now. And along the way you’ll get a dividend, which is more than you can say for staying in cash.

When I ran my hedge fund in Soho I was buying Apple for my investors on dips since 2003 and detailing it on TheStreet.com.  So let’s take a look back at how I’ve been pounding the table on Apple, and then consider that they make even more profitable devices today than the ones I used to talk about, and are selling them to millions more people.  And believe me, the Apple hate was strong back then too.

Meanwhile, the controversial halo effect from the iPod is in full effect, despite the protestations from the Apple haters. The Apple stores are packed, the iMac is selling like hotcakes (it sorta looks like a big, white computerized hotcake, come to think of it). The supply constraints for the computer business have been mostly cleared up, although I still think Apple’s biggest problem for the near term is meeting demand. There are worse problems to have.

It’d been a while since I’ve been barraged with panicky Apple (AAPLcommentaryCramer’s Take) emails. I suppose that’s because Apple’s hovering around $60 for the last few weeks has seemed relatively strong given how badly most momentum names have been smacked during this (ongoing?) meltdown.

I still own a decent bit of Apple from much, much lower levels and continue to hold it as the long-term outlook — as long as the options debacle doesn’t kill it — is very bullish.

Lord knows I’ve made a ton of bad trading and investment decisions over the years, many of which are all here in black and white on these pages. And certainly some of the Apple bears these days weren’t always bearish on the stock.But I wonder what the heck the value of these repeated attacks on Jobs’ tactics and strategies on these pages over the years from the same people who wanted us to sell at $10 (someday I’ll republish one a Fast Money dude’s email to me from summer of 2003 promising the demise of AAPL because the consumer was “dead”) at $20, at $50 at $100 and these days at $140.

Cody back in real-time here. I’m using options to add any time I get a chance, and we’ve owned Apple in the Revolution Investing portfolio since September 2010, when it was worth half as much. And I totally expect that we’ll double our money again from here. Keep buying Apple on the pullbacks, though not necessarily the day it rallies, the day someone re-iterates an Apple $1000 call (you read the very first Apple $1000 call right here on these pages, of course, for the record).