What if you bought Biogen in 2003?
US Health · Biotech. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play3.8× · S&P 500 same money: $7,727
$1,000 in Biogen at the start of 2003 would be worth about $3,750 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Biogen's modern form arrived in 2003, when Biogen merged with Idec, and multiple sclerosis became its core. Early on it faced a scare: its new MS drug Tysabri was pulled in 2005 after a rare brain infection, PML, was found in patients, before returning with restrictions. Later Tecfidera, an oral MS pill launched in 2013, made Biogen a biotech darling, and the shares rose more than sixfold from 2010 to 2015.
That peak was the high-water mark. MS sales faced competition and generics, and the company staked its future on Alzheimer's disease. In 2019 it halted trials of aducanumab for futility, then reversed course after reanalysing data; the FDA granted a highly controversial approval in 2021 as Aduhelm, but Medicare restricted coverage, doctors stayed sceptical, and the drug was quietly discontinued. Its successor, Leqembi, developed with Eisai, launched in 2023 to slow uptake. Shares that once sat above $300 ended the period around half of that. A position in Biogen is mainly a lesson in what happens when the big next bet does not land.
The lesson: Companies whose old franchise is fading often bet everything on a single moonshot, and investors underestimate how often those binary bets fail.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | $40.00 | $3,750 | $7,727 | 3.8× |
| 2005 | $67.00 | $2,239 | $5,763 | 2.2× |
| 2007 | $49.00 | $3,061 | $4,789 | 3.1× |
| 2008 | $57.00 | $2,632 | $4,626 | 2.6× |
| 2010 | $54.00 | $2,778 | $6,071 | 2.8× |
| 2012 | $110 | $1,364 | $5,312 | 1.4× |
| 2015 | $340 | $441 | $3,301 | 0.4× |
| 2018 | $320 | $469 | $2,519 | 0.5× |
| 2020 | $297 | $505 | $2,092 | 0.5× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $3,750. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
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. Biogen is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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