What if you bought BYD in 2010?
World · China. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play5.6× · S&P 500 same money: $6,071
$1,000 in BYD at the start of 2010 would be worth about $5,625 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
BYD was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 by chemist Wang Chuanfu as a maker of rechargeable batteries for phones, and bought its way into cars in 2003. In 2008 Berkshire Hathaway, at Charlie Munger's urging, took a roughly ten percent stake, and the shares soared on the story. Reality was slower: early electric models sold poorly, dealer networks struggled, and between 2010 and 2012 the stock lost around two thirds of its value. For most of the 2010s BYD was best known for electric buses and plug-in hybrids sold with the help of Chinese subsidies.
The breakthrough came with its in-house Blade battery and cheap, competent plug-in hybrids and electric cars just as Chinese demand exploded. In 2022 BYD stopped making pure combustion-engine cars, and by 2025 it was selling more fully electric vehicles than Tesla while expanding into Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. A brutal domestic price war squeezed margins, and Berkshire, after years of trimming, had exited its stake by 2025. The price still ended many times above its 2020 level.
The lesson: A correct long-term thesis can still involve a decade of looking wrong; BYD's investors needed to survive a two-thirds drawdown before the story came true.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $8.00 | $5,625 | $6,071 | 5.6× |
| 2012 | $2.50 | $18,000 | $5,312 | 18.0× |
| 2015 | $4.00 | $11,250 | $3,301 | 11.2× |
| 2018 | $8.00 | $5,625 | $2,519 | 5.6× |
| 2020 | $5.00 | $9,000 | $2,092 | 9.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2012, turning $1,000 into $18,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,312.
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. BYD is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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