What if you bought Alibaba in 2015?
World · China. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.2× · S&P 500 same money: $3,301
$1,000 in Alibaba at the start of 2015 would be worth about $1,238 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Alibaba began as a business-to-business marketplace founded by Jack Ma in Hangzhou in 1999 and grew into China's dominant e-commerce platform through Taobao and Tmall, plus a cloud business and a large stake in the payments affiliate Ant Group. Its 2014 New York listing was the largest IPO in history at the time, held through the usual Cayman Islands variable-interest-entity structure. The shares rose with Chinese consumer spending and peaked in late 2020.
Then politics intervened. In October 2020 Jack Ma criticised Chinese financial regulators in a speech; days later Ant's record IPO was halted. Alibaba received a record antitrust fine in 2021, Ma largely disappeared from public life, and a broader crackdown on technology platforms coincided with slowing growth and fierce competition from PDD and Douyin. The stock lost around three quarters of its value from its peak. A 2023 plan to split into six units was partly abandoned, and enthusiasm for its cloud and Qwen AI models drove a rebound from 2025, though shares stayed well below their highs.
The lesson: Regulatory risk is not a footnote; when the state decides a sector has grown too powerful, profits matter less than political goodwill.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $105 | $1,238 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $175 | $743 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $215 | $605 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2015, turning $1,000 into $1,238. The S&P 500 from that same year: $3,301.
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. Alibaba is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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