Do I own Apple through an S&P 500 index fund? What Tim Cook's exit means for UK investors

Five minutes a week that makes you smarter and calmer about your own money — plus a look at what I’m actually doing with mine…

On Monday Tim Cook cleared his desk at Apple after fifteen years as chief executive. He arrived with the company worth $347 billion. He left it worth $4.7 trillion.

If you hold an S&P 500 tracker, you were a shareholder for the whole ride. Nobody asked you. You didn’t have to spot Apple in 2011, or hold your nerve through the flat years, or decide whether the new man is up to it.

That’s the good thing about index investing. You don’t have to be clever. You just have to be there.

Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011 with the shares at $13.35. He handed over to John Ternus on 1 September with them at $316.61. Someone who put £9,999 into Apple that first week has about £249,000 today. The same money in a plain S&P 500 fund would be worth about £66,000.

Nobody rings a bell at the start of a run like that. In 2011 the clever money was worried Apple couldn’t survive without Jobs. They were very wrong.

What it means for you: If you own an S&P 500 fund, Apple is your second-biggest holding at about 7% and John Ternus is now running it on your behalf. There’s nothing to do. That’s the point.

NS&I has lifted the prize-fund rate to 4.35% from the September draw, up from 3.8%, and the odds on each £1 bond winning anything are now one in 21,000. There are still two £1 million prizes a month.

The catch is in the word “average”. The 4.35% is what all the prizes add up to across everyone. Most holders win less than that, because a few big prizes drag the average up. With £1,000 in and ordinary luck, you’ll win nothing in most months.

What it means for you: The best easy-access cash ISAs were paying about 4.5% when the change was announced, guaranteed and tax-free. Premium Bonds are ok if you just want a flutter. They’re not an investment, and they were never meant to be (neither are Cash ISAs btw).

Brent crude reached $98.70 on Tuesday after Houthi strikes on energy facilities in southern Saudi Arabia. It’s the highest it’s been in six weeks.

Dearer oil feeds straight into inflation, which is why the two interest rate decisions next week — America’s on Wednesday, ours on Thursday — are now about whether to raise, not when to cut. The betting on an American rise is about 60%.

What it means for you: Petrol first, then everything that arrives on a lorry gets more expensive. For your investments, nothing to do. The market has dealt with oil shocks before and it’ll deal with this one.

You can see every position I hold, and what each has done, on the portfolio pages, refreshed with last night’s prices.

I said last week that I’m building a new third pool of investments — the dependable businesses you buy once and hold for years while they compound. The companies that grow wealth reliably and sustainably, whilst you do nothing.

The new portfolio is based on Warren Buffett’s tests for a great business:

Until recently, applying those tests to a whole market meant going through a decade of accounts and quarterly reports for hundreds of companies — weeks of work for a small team of people. With AI we can now reduce this huge task to an automated process that can be done in hours or days. I’ve built a screener using Claude Code and so far I have run 898 companies through it.

Eighty-six passed the quality tests. Only nine are cheap enough to buy today. Fifty-seven of the rest are great businesses at two to three times what I think they’re worth — Microsoft, Apple, Visa and Costco among them. I’m refining and testing the model with historical data, and will be launching the new portfolio soon.

When you own a share, you own a slice of a business. That business makes a profit. Your slice of that profit is yours, whether the company pays it out as a dividend or keeps it to grow. Buffett calls it look-through earnings: look through the share price to the profit underneath.

Say you own £10,000 of a fund, and the companies in it earn £500 a year between them on your slice. That £500 is what you actually made as an owner this year. The share price might say you’re up £1,500 or down £800, but that’s other people’s opinion of what your slice is worth today. The £500 is real.

It’s the number I watch first, before price. If my share of the profits is growing 10% a year, the portfolio is working and the price will catch up. If it isn’t, a rising price is just luck.

“To get rich you have to find the next Apple.”

You already found it. So did everyone with an S&P 500 fund, fifteen years ago, without trying.

An index fund holds the winners because they’re winners. When Apple grew from $347 billion to $4.7 trillion, its share of the index grew with it, so your fund owned more and more of the best business in the world, automatically, with no decision required from you.

A lot of people who tried to find the next Apple, bought BlackBerry…

Market cap — short for market capitalisation, which is just the price of one share multiplied by the number of shares. It’s what the whole company would cost to buy at today’s price. Apple’s is $4.7 trillion; Tesco’s is about £30 billion. It’s also what decides how much of your index fund each company gets.

Book of the week: The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel. Nineteen short stories about how people actually behave with money, and why the smart ones so often end up poorer than the patient ones. The chapter on the petrol-station attendant who died with $8 million is worth the price on its own. It’s the book I’d hand to someone who says investing isn’t for them. Get it on Amazon.

Check whether you’ve won a Premium Bonds prize you never claimed. NS&I’s prize checker, free, takes thirty seconds. nsandi.com/prize-checker

Know someone with a drawer full of Premium Bonds who thinks that’s their investing sorted? Forward this to them.

See you next week.

Tim

I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions.