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It’s like buying Amazon at $18
I’m sure you’ve seen those internet articles. What if you bought Amazon at $18?
A little-known company at the time (at least to the rest of the world) Amazon Inc. founded by Jeff Bezos who no longer needs introduction, went public on May 15, 1997 at $18.00 per share. If you had invested $1,000 in Amazon at its IPO price in 1997, you would have purchased 55.5 shares, not including commission expenses or fractional shares. Taking into account Amazon’s four stock splits, these 55.5 shares would have multiplied into 13,320 shares, as of today — a rough equivalent of a little over a million dollars as at the time of writing this.
We hear these stories all the time and indulge our imagination, counting the millions of phantom dollars we would have gained or lost. This is a common preoccupation of the mind. It embraces imagination to fill in the gaps in the faulty narrative of our life’s streaming reality. Painfully, there is a part of our subconscious that occupies the grey area between imagination and reality — where the good feeling that comes from these conjured up scenarios give us a temporary sense of achievement. At the other end of its loopy…
