What if you bought Copper (lb) in 1990?
Commodities · Metal. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play5.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Copper (lb) at the start of 1990 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
Copper is called Dr. Copper because its price is supposed to diagnose the health of the global economy; it goes into wiring, plumbing, motors and power grids. The 1990s were dull and occasionally scandalous: in 1996 Sumitomo disclosed that its copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka had run up losses of roughly $2.6 billion over years of unauthorized trading. By 2002 the price had sunk well below a dollar a pound.
Then China's industrialisation turned everything around. As China grew to consume roughly half the world's copper, prices roughly quadrupled during the 2000s, crashed in late 2008, then rebounded to records in 2011. When China's construction and investment slowed, copper fell back through 2015-2016. The latest chapter is electrification: electric vehicles, renewable energy and grid upgrades all use far more copper than what they replace, and data centres for AI added another source of demand. With new mines taking a decade or more to develop, prices reached new highs in 2024, and tariff threats in 2025 opened a strange gap between US and international prices. Over the whole period, copper ended about five times higher.
The lesson: A compelling long-term demand story still meets supply eventually; copper's multi-decade path shows how high prices summon new mines and stretch out the cycle.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1.10 | $5,000 | $19,429 | 5.0× |
| 1995 | $1.35 | $4,074 | $14,783 | 4.1× |
| 2000 | $0.85 | $6,471 | $4,626 | 6.5× |
| 2003 | $0.75 | $7,333 | $7,727 | 7.3× |
| 2005 | $1.45 | $3,793 | $5,763 | 3.8× |
| 2007 | $2.90 | $1,897 | $4,789 | 1.9× |
| 2008 | $3.20 | $1,719 | $4,626 | 1.7× |
| 2010 | $3.40 | $1,618 | $6,071 | 1.6× |
| 2012 | $3.50 | $1,571 | $5,312 | 1.6× |
| 2015 | $2.80 | $1,964 | $3,301 | 2.0× |
| 2018 | $3.20 | $1,719 | $2,519 | 1.7× |
| 2020 | $2.80 | $1,964 | $2,092 | 2.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $7,333. 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. Copper (lb) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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