Harsh Reality: Investors Overpaid for Apple Stock

We hate to break it to investors who dumped barrels of cash into Apple over the last several months, but the bitter truth is it was a bad investment. Maybe in the long term they'll all look like savvy investors and the past three months will become a distant memory. Or maybe Apple was never worth as much as its share price suggested.

To put things into perspective, Business Insider crunched some numbers and found that more money has been lost in Apple over the last three months than in Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Research In Motion (RIM) combined. How so? Follow BI's lead on this one.

Apple Store

At its peak in 2000, HP's stock hit a high of $65 per share, which valued the company at around $130 billion. Today HP trades for $14 per share, giving it a market capitalization of $30 billion. Going from then until now, investors have lost $100 billion in HP.

RIM, on the other hand, peaked at a little more than $140 per share in 2008, which valued the company at $70 billion. Today RIM trades for just $11 per share, giving it a market capitalization of $6 billion. That's a loss of $65 billion. Add HP's losses and the tally comes to $165 billion down the drain.

As for Apple, the Cupertino outfit hit a high of $705.07 per share three months ago, valuing d the company at $660 billion. It's since fallen to $510 per share, dropping its market capitalization to $485 billion. That's a loss of $175 billion, or $10 billion more than HP and RIM combined.