26 June 1992: Starbucks goes public
Starbucks began trading on Nasdaq on June 26, 1992, priced at $17 a share. Howard Schultz's chain then had only a small fraction of the thousands of stores it would eventually open worldwide. Skeptics wondered how many people would pay several dollars for coffee. The answer, after many splits, turned an IPO share into a fortune for patient holders.
The lesson: Small luxuries that people buy daily can compound into enormous businesses.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Starbucks at the start of 1995 → $52,941 today, vs $14,783 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1995, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 52.9 times the money, and $38,159 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Starbucks teaches: Growth for its own sake can erode the very thing that made a brand special; store count is not the same as value.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $1.70 | $52,941 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $5.50 | $16,364 | $4,626 |
| 2003 | $5.00 | $18,000 | $7,727 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Starbucks? 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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