Why is betting against Apple the extraordinary claim?

An Office Hours question asked on June 9, 2026.

Q: You recently calculated Apple’s CAGR at an impressive 26.6% over the last twenty years. Without giving stock advice, what do you make of Apple’s forward prospects?

The point of my article was that more than half of analysts have a hold, a sell, or no opinion on Apple, and I found that surprising. I aggregated the ratings myself, and it settled to about fifty firms actively covering, split roughly half Buy, half Don't Buy. A “hold” says the stock is fairly priced, and if a company is growing twenty percent a year, it doubles its revenue in three to four years. So if that’s the growth, why would you not buy?

Computing the CAGR from each year forward to the present, over twenty years shows the curves are volatile early but then settle around twenty to twenty-five percent. So why are these analysts so cautious? Because they’re making one-year calls, swamped by near-term noise, while the CAGR is a multi-year return: lots of short-term volatility, lots of steady long-term growth.

I’m only dumb enough to assume that twenty years of history is long enough to see a pattern. I know history doesn’t guarantee the future. But we could have had this same conversation every day for the last fifteen years, and the flywheel just kept spinning and it also kept getting more massive. It’s actually extraordinary to assume that a massive flywheel with this much momentum suddenly stops. That’s, for me, the harder thing to argue than that it won't stop.

You can do the same with GDP. Countries compound at two to three percent for two hundred years, and the most likely future is more of the same, not utopia or catastrophe. Extrapolating a long-term trend a few years out is not an extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that it stops: that Apple loses its place as the interface to the most valuable devices in the world, that customer satisfaction evaporates, that all the threats we’ve heard a hundred times finally land. I’ve heard them before. They never happened. So why should I believe them now?

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Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.

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