An Apple A Day: If you had bought 1 Apple share on every single trading day since its IPO, you’d have earned $10 million.

March 23, 2011

You might have come across it in the past few weeks: Kyle Conroy has made a nice table that lets you see how much money you’d have earned if you had not invested it in an Apple product, but in Apple stock at that very time (see: What if I had bought Apple stock instead?).

Now, that inspired me to do a similar kind of calculation. We all know the proverb “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away”. It actually does earn you a lot of money, too. If you had bought an Apple share a day, ever since Apple went public on December 12 1980, you’d have earned 9.88 million dollars by now. Say you started when Apple announced the first iPod back in 2001, that’s still more than half a million in profits.

Where did I get the data from? Actally, Wolfram Alpha does a great job at tasks like this. It got me the historical Apple stock prices as well as the number of days (sometimes even weekdays) between two specific dates. NYSE Trading Holidays are taken from here and the exact dates of Apple’s stock splits from the company’s investor relations page.

A note on the numbers: They do take into consideration the three stock splits that Apple has made, in 1987, 2000 and 2005. They are not, however, adjusted for inflation. Also, I’m not entirely sure whether my calculations are 100% correct. Those 2 for 1 splits make things a bit complicated. You can check the raw data and my calculations here. Please let me know if you find any mistakes.