Selling Apple In October Wasn’t The Best Move, But Not Buying Google Was Worse

MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company’s Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron. After all, Apple’s stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump).

So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right?
Maybe, maybe not.

Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever.

Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was staggeringly oversold on October 19, but I’ll be damned if I’m calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don’t know what you did with the money.

In hindsight, it may have been smarter to hold on to it, but that’s the harsh reality of the volatile stock market for you. If the future could be accurately predicted, we could all make a killing.

Now, a decidedly smart move would have been buying Google the very same day you shouldn’t have sold AAPL. On October 19, 2011, GOOG closed at $580.7. Last Friday, stock price reached $652.73. That’s a 12+ percent bump, or about double the gain Apple saw in the same timeframe.

Now, if you sold your Apple stock in October to stock up on Research In Motion or Nokia instead …