There are a lot of sophisticated investors on this site, but I suspect few have ever bought a financial asset that outperformed an apple tree.

Let's do some quick math using rough averages:

An apple tree graft costs about $35. It takes 4 years to start bearing fruit, and then has a productive life of 25 years. There are minimal ongoing expenses, mostly watering and mulch. In some cases, these costs can be zero, but let's budget $5/year.

That's a total cost of $160 over the lifetime of the apple tree.

Over 25 years, one can expect an apple tree to produce 7,500 apples, peaking at 400 apples per year. There is a wide variation of 100-800 apples/year for different types of trees in different environments, but let's keep things simple. A decent sized apple is 1/3 of a pound, so that's 2,500 pounds of apples produced from one tree over its lifetime.

Commodity prices for apples are $2-3/lb, and direct sale prices are $5/lb. Specialty or organic varieties can cost more, but let's assume you sell apples for $4/lb.

Let's also assume the apple tree is not treated with pesticides. That means no fertilizer costs, though you may get some apples lost to pests and disease (picking disease-resistant varieties can reduce these losses).

Let's lower production expectations by 20% to account for unexpected losses. That means 2,000 lbs of apples over a lifetime, sold at $4/lb for a grand total of $8,000, or $320/year.

In other words, you're getting a 64x return each year from a $5/year input of water and mulch.

And even when accounting for the upfront cost of the tree, $320 is double the lifetime input costs for your apple tree, and you get it every single year for a quarter of a century. Not bad.

But what about all the labor, packing, and selling related costs?

A typical apple tree can be harvested with hand tools in 3 hours, so let's assume that is worth $100 of your time (the average hourly wage in the US today). If there are another 3 hours spent packing and selling apples, that still produces a $115/year profit.

But what if you don't want to sell your apples? Well, you stand to earn even more money. Recall that a typical apple tree produces 400 apples/year, and 1 apple/day keeps your doctor away.

If you choose to eat your 400 apples each year, you don't have to pack or sell your apples, and the time spent harvesting them simply replaces the time you would have otherwise spent in the apple section at the grocery store each week.

It's true that some varieties of apples don't keep well, but varieties like Goldrush can store well for 6-8 months, and their flavor actually improves during storage. They also have strong disease resistance and top-tier flavor in general.

So you get your full $315/year of profit in the form of grocery bill savings, and since you're not making any direct sales by consuming your own apples, you have no sales taxes to pay as a producer.

So... can you outperform an apple tree?