I'd resisted doing this calculation for a long, long time.
In 2004, I had a windfall. I needed to invest it. I kicked around a few ideas, and one of those ideas was then-struggling Apple. The iPod wasn't a thing yet, let alone iTunes, the iPhone, iPad, and so on. No one knew what was about to happen. I wouldn't have even considered Apple if their P/E ratio hadn't been so ridiculously low. I kept staring at that P/E number. Yeah, they're obviously past their prime, but they are still seriously undervalued, I thought over and over. After mulling it over for a week, I did the prudent thing. I put the money into my house, where a return was guaranteed. These are phony numbers now (knowing what would happen to interest rates), but given what I knew at the time, I was spending $80k to save a guaranteed $229k in interest over 30 years. To this gutless puss, that seemed like a good deal. I took it.
And then.
This weekend, I calculated what would have happened on the path not taken, the bold path, the iPath. That $80k would have multipled exactly eighty times. That's $6.4 million, ladies and gentlemen. Six-point-four million little monuments to cowardice.
Of course, only $6.32 million of that would have been profit. Perspective is important, right?