What if you bought BP in 1990?
World · UK. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.6× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in BP at the start of 1990 would be worth about $1,650 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
BP spent the late 1990s becoming a supermajor, buying Amoco in 1998 and ARCO in 2000, and then rebranded itself with the slogan Beyond Petroleum. The shares tripled during the 1990s. Its safety record lagged its ambitions: an explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 killed fifteen workers, and a corroded pipeline in Alaska leaked oil in 2006.
The defining disaster came in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people and causing the largest marine oil spill in US history. BP suspended its dividend, sold assets and ultimately paid more than $60 billion in cleanup, fines and settlements. It later took a large stake in Rosneft, which it wrote off after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In 2020 it announced an aggressive pivot to renewables, which it largely reversed in 2025 under pressure from investors including the activist hedge fund Elliott. From 2000, the share price fell by almost half.
The lesson: Low-probability disasters can wipe out years of returns in a single day, which is why operational risk deserves more weight than a dividend yield.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $20.00 | $1,650 | $19,429 | 1.6× |
| 1995 | $27.00 | $1,222 | $14,783 | 1.2× |
| 2000 | $60.00 | $550 | $4,626 | 0.6× |
| 2003 | $40.00 | $825 | $7,727 | 0.8× |
| 2005 | $58.00 | $569 | $5,763 | 0.6× |
| 2007 | $67.00 | $493 | $4,789 | 0.5× |
| 2008 | $73.00 | $452 | $4,626 | 0.5× |
| 2010 | $58.00 | $569 | $6,071 | 0.6× |
| 2012 | $43.00 | $767 | $5,312 | 0.8× |
| 2015 | $38.00 | $868 | $3,301 | 0.9× |
| 2018 | $42.00 | $786 | $2,519 | 0.8× |
| 2020 | $38.00 | $868 | $2,092 | 0.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $1,650. 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. BP is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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