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If you ask retired NFL Super Bowl champion tight end Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski about the best investment he ever made, he’ll say it was $69,000 of Apple stock he bought and forgot about until years later, when he discovered his investment had done QUITE well for him.
The investment advice that spurred Gronk into dropping a bit of his money into Apple can from an unexpected source. Gronk says a man that was building a house for him would not shut up about Apple stock. Gronk decided “what the heck,” and invested $69K into AAPL.
“Every time I saw him, when we were building the house, he kept saying, ‘Get Apple. Get Apple,'” Gronkowski told Fortune. “So after the 50th time, I got it. And let me tell you, it’s the best investment I’ve ever had in my life.”
“I [had] never been involved in stocks,” he continued. “I really didn’t know how stocks work.”
“So I call up my financial advisor. I’m like ‘put $69,000 in Apple’,” explains Gronk. “My own money, with no advice like this, is just from the guy who built my house here in the New England area.”
Gronkowski then forgot all about the investment until two years later. When he checked on his investment, he found that his initial $69,000 investment had grown to $250,000.
It turned out to be a good time to invest in Apple. The Cupertino firm had a bad year in 2013, and the consensus among financial analysts was that Apple’s 2014 fiscal year wouldn’t be any better.
Instead, thanks to the debut of the first Apple Watch, strong sales of the Mac lineup, and excellent sales of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple blew away investors’ expectations and the stock began increasing in price and kept on going.
Gronkowski may play a dummy in some of his seemingly thousands of commercials, but he’s no dummy in real life, holding on to his Apple stock and watching his investment continue to grow.
“Now to this day, I have over $600,000 in Apple stock, all because of the investment I made in 2014 having no idea what I was doing,” said Gronkowski, “but just listening to the guy that built my house here in New England.”