Your shopping list: Granny Smith and Apple stock

Gift cards are the perfect present. It's the gift of choice and it's more thoughtful than cash. You can now buy gift cards for stocks. Blackhawk the largest distributor of gift cards (supplies the gift rack cards at the end of the aisle at your local Woolworths) has teamed up with Stockpile (the broker dealer) making available a gift card that can be redeemed online for stock. The cards will cost $4.95 for a $25 gift card with 20 popular companies like Apple, Tesla, Facebook and Berkshire Hathaway. Given the high share price of these stocks owners will likely have exposure to a fraction of the share. Last year the average shopper spent $166 on gift cards up 23% (source packaged facts 2014). Blackhawk's most popular gift card is Apple's iTunes around 12.5% of their sales. It will be interesting to see which stock will be the most gifted this Christmas. Instead of a Tesla car you might get $25 of Tesla stock or even worse a coal stock! We all better be good for Christmas..... (VIEW LINK)