What if you bought Carnival in 1995?
US Consumer · Travel. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play5.0× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Carnival at the start of 1995 would be worth about $5,000 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Carnival is the world's largest cruise operator, owning Carnival Cruise Line, Princess, Holland America, Costa, Cunard and others. Built by Ted Arison and run for decades by his son Micky, it turned cruising from a luxury into a mass-market holiday. The late 1990s were glorious for the shares, and after the 2001 travel shock the business grew steadily as it ordered ever larger ships.
Reputation crises came in waves. In 2012 the Costa Concordia capsized off Italy, killing 32 people, and in 2013 an engine-room fire left the Carnival Triumph adrift with failing toilets. Then came 2020: the Diamond Princess became one of the first well-known Covid outbreaks, US sailings stopped for over a year, and Carnival survived only by raising huge amounts of debt at high interest and issuing many new shares. Passengers returned in record numbers from 2023, but shareholders now owned a smaller slice of a far more indebted company, which is why the share price sat well below its 2020 level.
The lesson: Surviving a crisis is not the same as recovering from it: emergency debt and share issuance can leave shareholders poorer even after customers come back.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $6.00 | $5,000 | $14,783 | 5.0× |
| 2000 | $48.00 | $625 | $4,626 | 0.6× |
| 2003 | $25.00 | $1,200 | $7,727 | 1.2× |
| 2005 | $58.00 | $517 | $5,763 | 0.5× |
| 2007 | $49.00 | $612 | $4,789 | 0.6× |
| 2008 | $44.00 | $682 | $4,626 | 0.7× |
| 2010 | $32.00 | $938 | $6,071 | 0.9× |
| 2012 | $34.00 | $882 | $5,312 | 0.9× |
| 2015 | $45.00 | $667 | $3,301 | 0.7× |
| 2018 | $66.00 | $455 | $2,519 | 0.5× |
| 2020 | $51.00 | $588 | $2,092 | 0.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $5,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
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. Carnival is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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