What if you bought Comcast in 1990?
US Consumer · Media. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play29.2× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Comcast at the start of 1990 would be worth about $29,167 today — 29.2 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Comcast began as a small Mississippi cable system bought by Ralph Roberts in the 1960s and grew, deal by deal, into America's largest cable operator. The late 1990s internet boom priced it as a broadband gatekeeper, and it spent the 2000s digesting AT&T Broadband, which it bought in 2002. Investors spent most of that decade waiting; the share price barely moved, then halved in the 2008 crash.
The 2010s were the payoff. Comcast took control of NBCUniversal from GE in 2011 and bought the rest in 2013, gaining a TV network, a film studio and theme parks. A bid for Time Warner Cable collapsed under regulatory pressure in 2015, and in 2018 it outbid Disney and Fox for Sky in Europe. Since 2020 the arithmetic has turned: cord-cutting erodes pay-TV, fixed broadband faces wireless and fibre rivals, and Peacock has been expensive to build. The shares drifted lower into the mid-2020s as Comcast prepared to spin off most of its cable networks.
The lesson: A business that owns the pipes earns fat margins until a new pipe arrives; incumbency is a moat only while the underlying technology stays put.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1.20 | $29,167 | $19,429 | 29.2× |
| 1995 | $2.00 | $17,500 | $14,783 | 17.5× |
| 2000 | $12.00 | $2,917 | $4,626 | 2.9× |
| 2003 | $12.00 | $2,917 | $7,727 | 2.9× |
| 2005 | $16.00 | $2,188 | $5,763 | 2.2× |
| 2007 | $21.00 | $1,667 | $4,789 | 1.7× |
| 2008 | $18.00 | $1,944 | $4,626 | 1.9× |
| 2010 | $8.50 | $4,118 | $6,071 | 4.1× |
| 2012 | $12.00 | $2,917 | $5,312 | 2.9× |
| 2015 | $29.00 | $1,207 | $3,301 | 1.2× |
| 2018 | $40.00 | $875 | $2,519 | 0.9× |
| 2020 | $45.00 | $778 | $2,092 | 0.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $29,167. 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. Comcast is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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