Friday, April 03, 2015

if I had only bought Microsoft and Oracle back then...

Microsoft celebrates their 40th anniversary, but only went public in 1986.  Oracle interestingly had their IPO one day previous.  CNBC looks back at what they've done since.  Let me take a look too.

Checking Yahoo, MSFT first day of trading was on 3/13/86 (a mere 29 years ago).  It opened at 25.50 which was the low of the day, hit a high of 29.25, and closed at 28.00.  [Bloomberg says it closed at 27.75.]

So say you bought 100 shares of MSFT at the closing price that day.  So you paid $2800.  The split adjusted price of MSFT on that day is 7 cents.  Which means the stock increased 28/.07 or 400 times.  So your $2800 would now be worth $1.12 million!

How about Oracle?  Interestingly, Yahoo has their first day of trading on that same day of 3/13/86.  It opened at 21.00 which was the low for the day, hit a high of 21.25, and closed at 21.00.  (So it really didn't do much that day.)

So say you bought 100 shares that day, paying $2100.  Yahoo has the adjusted close at 6 cents.  So the stock has increased 2100/.06 = 350 times.  So your $2100 would be now worth $735,000.

Those figures might not be exactly right since CNBC said MSFT gained 33% on the first day and ORCL gained 37%.  And they said that ORCL has outperformed MSFT, gaining 92600% vs. 64000%.  That's quite a bit off my calculations. But why quibble with your (near) million bucks?

Oddly, looking at Google, they have ORCL's price at 5.14 on that 3/12/86.  And Google has MSFT's price at .10 on 3/13/86.  I dunno, but I trust Yahoo more in this case.

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Then again, if you had sold on 12/1/99...

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