What if you bought Coffee (lb) in 1990?
Commodities · Soft. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play4.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Coffee (lb) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $4,375 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Arabica coffee, traded in New York, is a bet on Brazilian weather, which dominates global supply. The period begins just after the 1989 collapse of the International Coffee Agreement's export quotas, which sent prices tumbling. A severe Brazilian frost in 1994 more than doubled them, and then Vietnam's rapid rise as a robusta producer helped flood the market: by 2001-2002 prices hit century lows in real terms, a coffee crisis that devastated growers in Central America and Africa while coffee-shop chains expanded worldwide.
Prices recovered through the 2000s and spiked around 2011, fell back, and rose again after the 2014 Brazilian drought. Then the 2020s became a run of supply disasters: a 2021 frost in Brazil, droughts, a poor Vietnamese crop and rising costs, while demand kept growing in China and elsewhere. Arabica hit record nominal highs above $4 a pound in 2025, pushing retail prices up visibly; US tariffs on Brazilian goods added further disruption. Over the full period coffee rose more than fourfold, most of it in the final few years.
The lesson: Agricultural commodities can languish for decades and then surge when weather and underinvestment collide, so long-run averages say little about any particular decade.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.8 | $4,375 | $19,429 | 4.4× |
| 1995 | $1.60 | $2,188 | $14,783 | 2.2× |
| 2000 | $1.20 | $2,917 | $4,626 | 2.9× |
| 2003 | $0.65 | $5,385 | $7,727 | 5.4× |
| 2005 | $1.00 | $3,500 | $5,763 | 3.5× |
| 2007 | $1.20 | $2,917 | $4,789 | 2.9× |
| 2008 | $1.35 | $2,593 | $4,626 | 2.6× |
| 2010 | $1.40 | $2,500 | $6,071 | 2.5× |
| 2012 | $2.30 | $1,522 | $5,312 | 1.5× |
| 2015 | $1.70 | $2,059 | $3,301 | 2.1× |
| 2018 | $1.25 | $2,800 | $2,519 | 2.8× |
| 2020 | $1.30 | $2,692 | $2,092 | 2.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $5,385. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
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. Coffee (lb) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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