16 February 1990: Cisco goes public
Cisco Systems, a networking company founded by a husband-and-wife team from Stanford, made its stock market debut. Few outsiders understood routers, but the internet was about to explode and Cisco sold the plumbing. By March 2000 it was briefly the most valuable company in the world. Then the bubble burst and the stock lost most of its value. Great business, terrible price: both can be true.
The lesson: Even a winning company can be a losing investment if you pay any price at all for it.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Cisco at the start of 1990 → $1,071,429 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the year it happened. That is 1071.4 times the money, and $1,052,000 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Cisco teaches: Being right about a technology is not the same as being right about a stock; the internet boomed exactly as predicted while Cisco's 2000 buyers waited decades.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.07 | $1,071,429 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $1.60 | $46,875 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $53.00 | $1,415 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Cisco? Every starting year and the full story →
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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