What if you bought Applied Materials in 1990?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play357.1× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Applied Materials at the start of 1990 would be worth about $357,143 today — 357.1 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Applied Materials makes the machines that make chips: equipment that deposits, etches and inspects the microscopic layers on silicon wafers. It is a picks-and-shovels business, selling to whoever is winning the chip race, which makes its fortunes depend on how much the likes of TSMC, Samsung and Intel decide to spend in a given year. That spending is famously cyclical, and the shares soared in the 1990s, fell by roughly half after 2000, and were lower in 2012 than in 2000.
An attempted merger with Japan's Tokyo Electron was abandoned in 2015 after US antitrust objections. From the mid-2010s, though, demand broadened: smartphones, data centres, cars and then AI all needed more and more advanced chips, and governments began subsidising domestic fabs. US export controls on China from 2022 cut into a market that had become a large share of sales, but the overall build-out kept equipment orders high. Holders from 2012 made more than twenty times their money by 2026.
The lesson: Selling picks and shovels avoids betting on which miner wins, but it does not avoid the cycle; equipment makers suffer whenever their customers stop digging.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.7 | $357,143 | $19,429 | 357.1× |
| 1995 | $5.00 | $50,000 | $14,783 | 50.0× |
| 2000 | $25.00 | $10,000 | $4,626 | 10.0× |
| 2003 | $13.00 | $19,231 | $7,727 | 19.2× |
| 2005 | $17.00 | $14,706 | $5,763 | 14.7× |
| 2007 | $18.00 | $13,889 | $4,789 | 13.9× |
| 2008 | $18.00 | $13,889 | $4,626 | 13.9× |
| 2010 | $14.00 | $17,857 | $6,071 | 17.9× |
| 2012 | $11.00 | $22,727 | $5,312 | 22.7× |
| 2015 | $25.00 | $10,000 | $3,301 | 10.0× |
| 2018 | $52.00 | $4,808 | $2,519 | 4.8× |
| 2020 | $61.00 | $4,098 | $2,092 | 4.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $357,143. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. Applied Materials is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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