What if you bought ASML in 1995?
World · Netherlands. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play750.0× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in ASML at the start of 1995 would be worth about $750,000 today — 750.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
ASML was spun out of Philips and ASM International in 1984 as a small Dutch maker of lithography machines, the equipment that projects circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. In the 2000 tech bubble its shares soared and then more than halved by 2003. Few outside the semiconductor industry paid much attention.
The defining bet was extreme ultraviolet lithography, a technology so difficult that rivals gave up. Development took around two decades, required the purchase of light-source maker Cymer in 2013, and was partly funded by customers Intel, TSMC and Samsung, who took stakes in ASML in 2012. When EUV machines finally entered volume production around 2019, ASML became the only company in the world able to make them, each costing well over a hundred million euros. That monopoly made it central to geopolitics: under US pressure, the Dutch government restricted sales of its most advanced machines to China. The AI chip boom then made ASML Europe's most valuable tech company. From 2003, the shares rose more than a hundredfold.
The lesson: Patient, decade-long investment in a technology competitors abandon can create a near-monopoly, but the payoff often arrives long after most investors have lost interest.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $1.20 | $750,000 | $14,783 | 750.0× |
| 2000 | $15.00 | $60,000 | $4,626 | 60.0× |
| 2003 | $7.00 | $128,571 | $7,727 | 128.6× |
| 2005 | $15.00 | $60,000 | $5,763 | 60.0× |
| 2007 | $25.00 | $36,000 | $4,789 | 36.0× |
| 2008 | $30.00 | $30,000 | $4,626 | 30.0× |
| 2010 | $32.00 | $28,125 | $6,071 | 28.1× |
| 2012 | $42.00 | $21,429 | $5,312 | 21.4× |
| 2015 | $100 | $9,000 | $3,301 | 9.0× |
| 2018 | $190 | $4,737 | $2,519 | 4.7× |
| 2020 | $300 | $3,000 | $2,092 | 3.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $750,000. 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. ASML is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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