What if you bought Adyen in 2020?
World · Netherlands. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play2.2× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Adyen at the start of 2020 would be worth about $2,162 today — 2.2 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Adyen is an Amsterdam payments company founded in 2006 by Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff, both veterans of an earlier payments start-up. Its pitch was technical simplicity: one platform that handles online, in-app and in-store payments worldwide, rather than a patchwork of acquired systems. Large merchants such as Uber, Spotify and eBay signed up, and the company was profitable well before its 2018 Amsterdam listing, when the shares nearly doubled on the first day.
From 2020 the stock rode the pandemic surge in online shopping and the boom in fintech valuations, more than tripling to a peak in late 2021. Then rising interest rates hit growth stocks, and in August 2023 slowing growth and heavy hiring that squeezed margins sent the shares down by roughly 40 percent in a single day. The business itself kept growing and remained highly profitable; it was the price investors were willing to pay that changed. A buyer at the start of 2020 still roughly doubled their money, but anyone who bought at the 2021 peak learned how violently a premium valuation can compress.
The lesson: An excellent business priced for perfection can still drop sharply on a modest disappointment, because high valuations leave no room for slower growth.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $740 | $2,162 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $2,162. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
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. Adyen is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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