Share Investor: Long VS Short : Auckland International Airport

Friday, June 26, 2009

Long VS Short : Auckland International Airport

In this eight installment of the Long vs Short series I am once again going to take look at the chart comparisons for a stock from the Share Investor Portfolio and compare the 10 year return (chart above) to the turmoil of the last year with a 1 year return chart (large chart at bottom of post).

In this series I want to show the merits of investing, using charts, for the long-term vs short term gains or losses. I will use the longest available data to me for the long-term view (10 years )and will make a comparison against the NZX50.

In this segment of Long vs Short I will take a look at Auckland International Airport Ltd [AIA.NZ] .

I currently hold 3000 Auckland Airport shares after buying 1000 of them in November 2006 and 2000 in April of this year. (see small chart below for detail)

My Portfolio
Symbol	Price	Value	Earned
AIA.NZ	$1.600	$4800	$-540

You own 3000 [AIA.NZ] shares purchased at $1.78 [$5340]

This stock has been performing well fundamentally over the last 10 years and steady over the last 12 months. Its share price though has been fluctuating wildly over the last few years. From a high of over $3.60 during a competing bid to seize control of the company in 2007-2008 to $1.54 recently.

If I had held this stock for the full 10 years (see large chart at top) my return would have been a whopping 210%-including dividends, tax credits and minus brokerage, the NZX is a gross index of stocks.

By comparison if I had held the stock for just this last year (see large chart below) my return would have been a loss of just over 35%.

My total return after 2.5 years or so of holding AIA stock is a loss of just under 10% (see small chart above) That is after dividends and tax credits are added and brokerage applied, not bad considering the market drubbing of every listed NZX share but there is an 8c gain from the 2000 shares I bought in April at $1.70 each.

Having said that this exercise proves, once again, that the long-term bet is the only one to take.

Long-term, 8 in this series, short term 0.