Apple immune to stock sell-off

There have been many times while writing this column when we have lamented not selling everything we owned back in early 2009 and put it into Apple stock. If we had, we would now be four times better off.

Of course there are many other stocks that, in retrospect, we could have made a killing investing in, but one of the most galling things about Apple's situation is that its current success wasn't difficult to foresee at the start of 2009. The iPhone was already a massive success and the smartphone revolution was well underway.

What was less obvious was quite how quickly things would develop, and what a good job Apple would do of staying ahead of the game, not least through the launch of the iPad. But it's still hard to shake off the feeling that we should have seen the quadrupling of Apple's share price coming.

This week's HEXUS.sharewatch covers a four week period due to your correspondent's annual flirtation with warmer climes. In that time global stock markets have generally plummeted due to the ongoing European and US debt crises and many of our stocks have followed, with Sony, Dell and Oracle among those most punished, for some reason.

But, considering the DJIA and NASDAQ have both plunged by around ten percent in the past four weeks, it's remarkable how well some companies have performed. Of the companies on our list Vodafone has recovered best from the sell-off at the start of the month, but Apple isn't far behind. This is mainly down to its general strength, but gaining the upper hand in its battle with Samsung won't have done Apple's stock any harm.