21 May 2015: Shopify goes public
Shopify, the Ottawa company that helps merchants run online stores, began trading on the NYSE and Toronto exchanges on May 21, 2015. Priced at $17, the stock closed its first day up about 51%. Instead of competing with Amazon, Shopify armed everyone else. A few years later it became for a time Canada's most valuable company, though its share price proved anything but a smooth ride.
The lesson: Selling the picks and shovels to everyone in a gold rush can beat digging for gold yourself.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Shopify at the start of 2018 → $15,000 today, vs $2,519 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2018, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 15.0 times the money, and $12,481 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Shopify teaches: Extrapolating a one-off surge is dangerous; Shopify's own founder treated pandemic e-commerce growth as permanent and had to reverse course within two years.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $10.00 | $15,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $40.00 | $3,750 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Shopify? 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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