---
title: Bought first stock
date: 1998-10-13
week: 1284
type: life
---

With my steady employment at SLU we had finally escaped paycheck-to-paycheck living. Student loans weren't yet coming due, and for the first time in my emancipated life I felt like I had _wealth_, however modest.

Not much, mind you, but enough that I could ask myself "what do adults do with their money" and decided to invest in Apple Computer, Inc.

Why Apple? I was familiar with the company and followed with curiousity. They had recently fended off acquisition from Sun, and with the return of Steve Jobs[^jobs] had released the iMac and announced investment from Microsoft. When I learned that their market capitalization was sometimes dipping below their assets, it seemed like a pretty safe bet that maybe the suits on Wall Street just didn't understand.

[^jobs]: Jobs was always the "other Steve" to me, but NeXT had convinced me he had taste. And his first moves at Apple demonstrated he had [learned to manage towards customer value](https://twitter.com/marcelpociot/status/1198871239663722497).

So I took around $900 to a brokerage office and bought 28 shares of AAPL, which I recieved as a paper certificate.

In 2022 as I write this, that would have split to 3136 shares, worth almost $450,000. Unfortunately, I didn't hold it for that long, but I did still have it when I started more actively trading AAPL in 2005. Most of the time I've sold, it'd been to fund purchasing property.
