What if you bought Corn (bushel) in 1990?
Commodities · Grain. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.8× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Corn (bushel) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $1,833 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Corn is America's largest crop and, since the mid-2000s, a policy instrument as much as a food. For years prices sat near two dollars a bushel, reflecting abundant harvests and subsidised production. The game changed when Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2005 and expanded it in 2007, requiring ever more ethanol in petrol. Suddenly a large share of the US corn crop went into fuel tanks, and prices roughly doubled.
The peak came in 2012, when the worst US drought in decades pushed corn to around $8 at harvest time. Farmers responded as farmers do, by planting more corn everywhere they could, and global production in Brazil, Argentina and Ukraine kept expanding. Prices fell back and spent most of the following decade in the $3-4 range. The 2018-2019 US-China trade war, in which China cut purchases of American farm goods, hurt further, while the 2022 war in Ukraine gave a temporary boost. Over the full period corn did not quite double in nominal terms, losing ground to inflation.
The lesson: Demand created by government mandate can be capped or reversed by the next policy change, and high prices reliably encourage the extra planting that ends them.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $2.40 | $1,833 | $19,429 | 1.8× |
| 1995 | $2.30 | $1,913 | $14,783 | 1.9× |
| 2000 | $2.00 | $2,200 | $4,626 | 2.2× |
| 2003 | $2.40 | $1,833 | $7,727 | 1.8× |
| 2005 | $2.00 | $2,200 | $5,763 | 2.2× |
| 2007 | $3.90 | $1,128 | $4,789 | 1.1× |
| 2008 | $4.80 | $917 | $4,626 | 0.9× |
| 2010 | $4.10 | $1,073 | $6,071 | 1.1× |
| 2012 | $6.50 | $677 | $5,312 | 0.7× |
| 2015 | $3.90 | $1,128 | $3,301 | 1.1× |
| 2018 | $3.50 | $1,257 | $2,519 | 1.3× |
| 2020 | $3.90 | $1,128 | $2,092 | 1.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $2,200. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
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. Corn (bushel) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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