What if you bought Broadcom in 2010?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play194.4× · S&P 500 same money: $6,071
$1,000 in Broadcom at the start of 2010 would be worth about $194,444 today — 194.4 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
The modern Broadcom is really Avago Technologies, the former chip division of Agilent, itself a Hewlett-Packard spin-off, which private equity firms bought in 2005 and listed in 2009. Under chief executive Hock Tan it pursued an unusually blunt strategy: buy established technology businesses with sticky customers, cut costs hard, sell or close anything that did not lead its niche, and use the cash to buy the next one. In 2016 Avago bought Broadcom Corporation for about 37 billion dollars and took its name.
The pattern repeated. A hostile bid for Qualcomm was blocked by President Trump in 2018 on national security grounds, so Broadcom turned to software, buying CA Technologies, Symantec's enterprise arm and, in 2023, VMware, whose customers soon complained loudly about price increases. Meanwhile its networking chips and custom AI accelerators, designed with hyperscalers such as Google, made it one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI build-out. From its 2010 levels the stock rose by a factor of nearly two hundred.
The lesson: Disciplined capital allocation can be a competitive advantage in itself; Broadcom's returns came as much from how it bought and ran businesses as from invention.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $1.80 | $194,444 | $6,071 | 194.4× |
| 2012 | $3.00 | $116,667 | $5,312 | 116.7× |
| 2015 | $10.00 | $35,000 | $3,301 | 35.0× |
| 2018 | $26.00 | $13,462 | $2,519 | 13.5× |
| 2020 | $32.00 | $10,938 | $2,092 | 10.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2010, turning $1,000 into $194,444. The S&P 500 from that same year: $6,071.
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. Broadcom is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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