12 October 2015: Dell agrees to buy EMC for about $67 billion
Dell, then privately owned by Michael Dell and Silver Lake, agreed to buy data storage giant EMC for about $67 billion, the largest technology acquisition ever at the time. It was financed with heaps of debt and a complex tracking stock tied to EMC's stake in VMware. The bet was that old-school hardware still had plenty of cash to harvest, even as everything moved to the cloud.
The lesson: Mature businesses can be great investments when you pay the right price and expect little growth.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Dell at the start of 2015 → $1,000 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the year it happened. That is 1.0 times the money, but $2,301 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Dell teaches: Selling out at a take-private price can mean handing future gains to insiders; Dell's founder bought the company back cheaply when public investors had given up.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Dell? 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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