Every September, when Apple launches a phone, someone does the maths on what would have happened if you had bought the company instead of the product.
This year the numbers look good. Uncomfortably good, if you are holding a year-old iPhone.
Then you check the date, and the whole thing gets more interesting.
The straight comparison
On 10 September 2025, around the time the iPhone 17 went on sale, Apple shares traded at $225.95.
On 9 September 2026, they closed at $315.34.
That is a gain of 39.6% in dollar terms.
But an Indian buying American shares is making two bets at once, not one. The second is on the currency. Over the same twelve months, the rupee weakened against the dollar from roughly Rs 88 to around Rs 94.5 which works in your favour when your money is sitting in dollar assets.
Stack the two together and the rupee return comes to roughly 50%.
So the arithmetic runs like this. Rs 1.5 lakh converted at about Rs 88 to the dollar gives you close to $1,705. At $225.95 a share, that is around 7.5 shares. At today's price, those shares are worth about $2,379 which converts back to roughly Rs 2.25 lakh.
A paper gain of about Rs 75,000.
Meanwhile the phone is a year old.
Now look at the date
Here is the part that changes how you should read all of the above.
10 September 2025 was Apple's 52-week low. At $225.95, that was the cheapest the stock traded at any point in the following year.
That is not a small footnote. It means this comparison silently assumes you bought on the single best day available across an entire year a day nobody could have identified at the time, and which only looks obvious now.
Move the entry point by a few months in either direction and the number shrinks. Apple went on to touch $344.57 in late July 2026, and has come back roughly 8% from there since. Someone who bought at the July peak is currently down.
This is the standard weakness of the whole "you should have bought the stock" genre. The comparison always begins on a date chosen after the fact, and the date is almost never the unflattering one.
The 39.6% is real. It is just the best possible version of the trade, not the typical one.
Three costs that quietly shrink Rs 75,000
The gross figure is not what lands in your account. For an Indian investor buying US stocks, three things sit between the headline gain and the money.
Tax, and this is the big one. Foreign shares held for less than 24 months are treated as a short-term capital gain in India and taxed at your slab rate not at the 12.5% long-term rate that applies after 24 months. At twelve months, this trade is squarely short-term. For someone in the 30% bracket, a Rs 75,000 gain attracts roughly Rs 22,500 plus cess, leaving something closer to Rs 52,000. Hold the same position for another year and the treatment changes entirely.
Getting the money out, and back. Investing abroad happens under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which permits up to $250,000 per person per financial year. Remittances above the annual threshold attract Tax Collected at Source recoverable when you file, but money out of your hands in the meantime. On top of that, banks and platforms charge a forex markup on conversion, typically somewhere between 0.5% and 2%, and you pay it both going out and coming back.
Brokerage and platform fees. Smaller than the other two, but not zero.
None of this makes the investment a bad one. It does mean that "Rs 75,000 better off" is a gross number, and the net figure is meaningfully lower.
The comparison itself is a bit of a cheat
There is a deeper problem with this genre, and it is worth naming.
You did not set fire to Rs 1.5 lakh. You bought a device you have used every day for a year for work, for photographs, for navigation, for talking to people. That has value, even though no spreadsheet records it.
The phone also still exists. A year-old iPhone in good condition retains a substantial share of its price on the resale market, so the honest comparison is not Rs 1.5 lakh against Rs 2.25 lakh. It is what the phone is worth today, plus a year of using it, against what the shares are worth today, minus tax and costs.
Framed that way the gap narrows considerably.
And the genuinely correct version of this exercise is not "phone or shares". It is: could you have bought a cheaper phone that did the same job, and invested the difference? That question has a real answer and might actually change what someone does. "You should have skipped the phone entirely" does not, because almost nobody was going to.
What the exercise is actually good for
Not as a reproach, and not as a stock tip.
It is useful as a reminder that money spent on a depreciating object and money put into an appreciating one behave very differently over even a short period, and that the difference compounds. Anyone who upgrades a phone every year is making that trade repeatedly, and most people have never sat down and looked at the number.
It is also a reasonable illustration of how currency movement works for Indian investors holding foreign assets. Roughly a fifth of that 50% rupee return came from the rupee weakening, not from anything Apple did. That cuts both ways a strengthening rupee would have eaten into the gain and it is a risk many first-time overseas investors do not price in at all.
One last thing about buying a single stock
The comparison works this year because Apple went up. It is worth noting how narrow a bet that is.
Apple is currently about 8% below the all-time closing high of $339.79 it reached on 28 July 2026. Its 52-week range runs from $225.95 to $344.57 — a spread of more than 50% between low and high within a single year, in the largest company in the world.
Concentrating your savings in one company means accepting that kind of swing. The version of this article written in a year when Apple fell 20% would read very differently, and would not have been written at all.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. It reports historical prices and publicly available information, and does not recommend buying, selling or holding any security. Past performance is not an indicator of future returns. Share prices and exchange rates change continuously, and the figures here reflect specific dates stated in the text. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and on rules that can change. Anyone considering investing overseas should consult a SEBI-registered investment adviser and a qualified tax professional before acting.
