The value of always staying invested in the index.

Interesting data from Business Insider. The key take away from the chart was that even if you missed the 10 best days for staying vested in the market (when the lows help you average out), the rate of return almost halves from the 9.22% average return rate.

Summary:

• Based on my DCF analysis below I feel that the stock is undervalued. Please see the conclusions and detailed analysis at the end of the report.
• With the iwatch patent approved, and iphone6 in the wings, this analysis is still conservative.

Analysis:
My analysis is based on the following financial data for Apple:

Financial data used to feed the model

As always, please click on the image to enlarge.  The per-share information for aapl:

Financial per share data for aapl

Recently read a nice article on how to improve in your career. As described in the article, there are two approaches to reach a better career path:
1. Boredom induced - where your skills grow faster than your challenge dfifficulty and
2. Anxiety induced - which is the other way round.

Growth patterns for the career.

It nicely suggested that the second approach is better.

National football league  - hands down!

Based on a chart from here.

Highest paid athletes - per sport

World unemployment numbers as seen on the BI website. Please click on the image to enlarge.

This chart show s the global unemployment and also shows how much of the youth are unemployed. Youth unemployment being higher is generally more troublesome because it indicates that the strongest and the fittest part of the population is not able to find work - which can typically lead to the downfall of the society.

* Designations vary across companies so we cannot use those. Same with grades.

* Paychecks by themselves vary with cadre industries and grade. So you may not be able to use paychecks to compare the growth with others.

I think a fair metric to find out how you are doing with your career would be the metric:

Age normalized pay (ANP) =  (Current $ annual paycheck) / (Age)

Units:  $/yr

This simple metric should tell you how you are doing. So irrespective of the age, industry, group, designation of a particular employee you can find out how you are doing. The requirement of converting everything to US$ removes the discrepancy in earnings across different countries.  You could use any currency but they have to the same when doing the comparison.

The higher this metric the better you are doing.

E.g.
An employee earning 120K at the age of 35 has the metric at 3.42K/yr. On the other hand a much younger employee in the same group, possibly at the same grade earning 97K at the age of 27 is much better poised in his career since his ANP comes to approximately 3.6K/yr.

Modified from an answer read over the internet:

The two types of shares are essentially the same, except for the cost. Warren Buffet has refused to split the shares to get a lower share price and reports that Berkshire wants a very different type of shareholder. He is interested in the investor who is in for the long run, minimally concerned about daily price fluctuations, and minimal transactions and the high price associated with Class A shares maintains this.

Berkshire started to offer the Class B shares after (1) stockholders wanted a mechanism to gift shares to family members, and the gift tax limit is $10,000 ( so in the beginning you could gift a Class A share and it was less than 10K, but as the price rose this became impossible) and (2) private funds were getting ready to buy the Class A shares and then sell fractional interests via their fund.

Warren wanted to accomondate the first and prevent the second.
The floor manger for the Berkshire shares on the trading floor works to keep one Class B share = 1/30th of a class A share. It is not always a perfect 1/30th but it is often very close.

Berkshire also wants the price of the share to accurately reflect the underlying value of the business, and thus have minimal fluctuations.

The Class A shares also have a bigger voting right than the Class B shares (memory tells me that the Class B shares have a 1/200th of a vote even though they are about 1/30th in price.)

As always, please use your own judgment and research while investing!