

If you'd bought 100 shares of Microsoft 25 years ago... - buzzblog
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/if-you-had-bought-100-shares-microsoft-25-yea

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MicahWedemeyer
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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

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ja27
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.

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

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smackfu
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.

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daniel-cussen
"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.

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TomOfTTB
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>

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

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

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woan
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.

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

