What if you bought Chevron in 1990?
US Industry · Oil. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play9.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Chevron at the start of 1990 would be worth about $9,412 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Chevron, another descendant of Standard Oil, grew in the 2000s by merging with Texaco in 2001 and buying Unocal in 2005. Rising oil prices carried the shares up through 2008. Chevron also inherited a legal nightmare from Texaco: a long Ecuador pollution case, in which an Ecuadorian court ordered a huge judgment in 2011 that a US federal judge later found had been obtained through fraud.
Its biggest bet of the 2010s was LNG in Australia, where the Gorgon and Wheatstone projects ran far over budget. When the 2014 oil crash arrived, Chevron's shares fell, but the company kept paying and growing its dividend. In 2019 it tried to buy Anadarko, was outbid by Occidental and walked away with a 1 billion dollar break-up fee, then bought Noble Energy cheaply in 2020. In 2023 it agreed to buy Hess, mainly for its stake in Guyana's giant offshore oil fields; ExxonMobil challenged the deal in arbitration, delaying it until 2025, when Chevron won and closed the acquisition.
The lesson: Sometimes the best deal is the one you walk away from; disciplined acquirers who refuse to overpay keep their capital for better opportunities.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $17.00 | $9,412 | $19,429 | 9.4× |
| 1995 | $22.00 | $7,273 | $14,783 | 7.3× |
| 2000 | $43.00 | $3,721 | $4,626 | 3.7× |
| 2003 | $33.00 | $4,848 | $7,727 | 4.8× |
| 2005 | $52.00 | $3,077 | $5,763 | 3.1× |
| 2007 | $73.00 | $2,192 | $4,789 | 2.2× |
| 2008 | $93.00 | $1,720 | $4,626 | 1.7× |
| 2010 | $77.00 | $2,078 | $6,071 | 2.1× |
| 2012 | $106 | $1,509 | $5,312 | 1.5× |
| 2015 | $112 | $1,429 | $3,301 | 1.4× |
| 2018 | $125 | $1,280 | $2,519 | 1.3× |
| 2020 | $120 | $1,333 | $2,092 | 1.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $9,412. 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. Chevron is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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