What if you bought Adobe in 1995?
US Tech · Software. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play291.7× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Adobe at the start of 1995 would be worth about $291,667 today — 291.7 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Adobe was founded in 1982 around PostScript, the language that made desktop publishing possible, and later gave the world Photoshop, Illustrator and the PDF. Its shares rose strongly through the 1990s, crashed with tech in 2001, and recovered as Creative Suite became the standard toolkit for designers. The financial crisis and the death of Flash, which Apple refused to support on the iPhone, left the stock lower in 2012 than in 2007.
In 2013 Adobe did something bold: it stopped selling boxed software and moved everything to Creative Cloud subscriptions. Customers grumbled, revenue dipped briefly, and then recurring revenue made the business far more predictable and profitable. The shares rose more than tenfold over the following decade. Its 20 billion dollar bid for design start-up Figma was abandoned in 2023 under regulatory pressure, and generative AI raised an awkward question about the value of professional tools when anyone can type a prompt. By 2026 the stock traded well below its early-2020 level.
The lesson: Switching from one-off sales to subscriptions can rerate a business, but a durable moat still has to be defended when a new technology changes the work itself.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $1.20 | $291,667 | $14,783 | 291.7× |
| 2000 | $33.00 | $10,606 | $4,626 | 10.6× |
| 2003 | $12.00 | $29,167 | $7,727 | 29.2× |
| 2005 | $31.00 | $11,290 | $5,763 | 11.3× |
| 2007 | $41.00 | $8,537 | $4,789 | 8.5× |
| 2008 | $43.00 | $8,140 | $4,626 | 8.1× |
| 2010 | $37.00 | $9,459 | $6,071 | 9.5× |
| 2012 | $28.00 | $12,500 | $5,312 | 12.5× |
| 2015 | $73.00 | $4,795 | $3,301 | 4.8× |
| 2018 | $175 | $2,000 | $2,519 | 2.0× |
| 2020 | $330 | $1,061 | $2,092 | 1.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $291,667. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Adobe is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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