What if you bought Bovespa (in USD) in 1995?
Countries · Brazil. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play7.4× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Bovespa (in USD) at the start of 1995 would be worth about $7,429 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
The Bovespa is Brazil's main stock index, here measured in US dollars, which matters because the real has swung wildly. Brazilian stocks entered the 2000s battered by the 1999 devaluation and fears around the 2002 election of Lula, a former union leader. Then China's appetite for iron ore, soybeans and oil turned Brazil into a commodity superstar: Vale and Petrobras soared, the real strengthened, and in dollar terms the index rose roughly tenfold between 2003 and its peak around 2008 to 2011.
The unwinding was long. Commodity prices fell, the economy slid into a deep recession in 2015-16, and the Lava Jato investigation exposed a vast bribery scheme centred on Petrobras that implicated much of the political class. President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016. Local-currency gains in later years were repeatedly eroded by a weakening real, so that in dollar terms the index spent the following decade below its earlier highs.
The lesson: Emerging market returns are often a commodity and currency bet in disguise, so both can work for you and then against you in the same decade.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $35.00 | $7,429 | $14,783 | 7.4× |
| 2000 | $65.00 | $4,000 | $4,626 | 4.0× |
| 2003 | $35.00 | $7,429 | $7,727 | 7.4× |
| 2005 | $95.00 | $2,737 | $5,763 | 2.7× |
| 2007 | $210 | $1,238 | $4,789 | 1.2× |
| 2008 | $360 | $722 | $4,626 | 0.7× |
| 2010 | $400 | $650 | $6,071 | 0.7× |
| 2012 | $320 | $812 | $5,312 | 0.8× |
| 2015 | $190 | $1,368 | $3,301 | 1.4× |
| 2018 | $230 | $1,130 | $2,519 | 1.1× |
| 2020 | $290 | $897 | $2,092 | 0.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $7,429. 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. Bovespa (in USD) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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