What if you bought AMD in 1990?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play27.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in AMD at the start of 1990 would be worth about $27,500 today — 27.5 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Advanced Micro Devices spent decades as Intel's scrappy rival in x86 processors. It had genuine moments of glory, notably the Athlon and Opteron chips of the early 2000s, which briefly outclassed Intel's, and the shares rallied hard into the mid-2000s. Then it overpaid for graphics maker ATI in 2006, fell behind technically, spun off its factories as GlobalFoundries in 2009 and lost money for years.
By 2015 the stock traded around two dollars and many observers expected bankruptcy. Lisa Su, who became chief executive in 2014, bet the company on a new chip design called Zen; the Ryzen and EPYC processors launched in 2017 took significant market share from a stumbling Intel in PCs and, more importantly, servers. Outsourcing manufacturing to TSMC turned from a weakness into an advantage. AMD bought Xilinx in 2022 and became the main alternative to Nvidia in AI accelerators. From the 2015 low to 2026 the shares rose more than two hundredfold, while anyone who bought in 1995 waited about twenty years to see a real profit.
The lesson: Turnarounds are where fortunes are made and lost; AMD at two dollars could easily have gone to zero, and only hindsight makes it look obvious.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $8.00 | $27,500 | $19,429 | 27.5× |
| 1995 | $24.00 | $9,167 | $14,783 | 9.2× |
| 2000 | $15.00 | $14,667 | $4,626 | 14.7× |
| 2003 | $6.50 | $33,846 | $7,727 | 33.8× |
| 2005 | $22.00 | $10,000 | $5,763 | 10.0× |
| 2007 | $20.00 | $11,000 | $4,789 | 11.0× |
| 2008 | $7.50 | $29,333 | $4,626 | 29.3× |
| 2010 | $9.70 | $22,680 | $6,071 | 22.7× |
| 2012 | $5.40 | $40,741 | $5,312 | 40.7× |
| 2015 | $2.70 | $81,481 | $3,301 | 81.5× |
| 2018 | $10.00 | $22,000 | $2,519 | 22.0× |
| 2020 | $46.00 | $4,783 | $2,092 | 4.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2015, turning $1,000 into $81,481. The S&P 500 from that same year: $3,301.
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. AMD is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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