What if you bought Credit Suisse in 2003?
World · Switzerland. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.0× · S&P 500 same money: $7,727
$1,000 in Credit Suisse at the start of 2003 would be worth about $40.00 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
What happened: Credit Suisse was absorbed by UBS in 2023.
The story
Credit Suisse, founded in 1856 to finance Swiss railways, was for most of its history a pillar of Swiss finance and global investment banking. It came through the 2008 crisis without a state bailout, unlike rival UBS, and its shares held up better than many peers. That was close to its high point.
The years that followed read like a catalogue of scandals: a 2014 guilty plea in the US for helping Americans evade taxes, loans tied to the Mozambique tuna bond scandal, and a 2019 affair in which executives were spied on by private detectives, leading to the CEO's resignation. In 2021 it lost about $5.5 billion on the collapse of Archegos Capital and froze funds linked to the failed lender Greensill. Clients withdrew money, capital had to be raised repeatedly, and in March 2023, after a run on deposits, the Swiss authorities arranged a takeover by UBS for about three billion francs. Its additional tier 1 bonds were written down entirely. From 2007, shareholders lost nearly everything.
The lesson: Repeated risk-management failures are a pattern rather than bad luck, and a bank's reputation can collapse long before its balance sheet visibly does.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | $20.00 | $40.00 | $7,727 | 0.0× |
| 2005 | $35.00 | $22.86 | $5,763 | 0.0× |
| 2007 | $55.00 | $14.55 | $4,789 | 0.0× |
| 2008 | $50.00 | $16.00 | $4,626 | 0.0× |
| 2010 | $45.00 | $17.78 | $6,071 | 0.0× |
| 2012 | $24.00 | $33.33 | $5,312 | 0.0× |
| 2015 | $24.00 | $33.33 | $3,301 | 0.0× |
| 2018 | $18.00 | $44.44 | $2,519 | 0.0× |
| 2020 | $13.00 | $61.54 | $2,092 | 0.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $61.54. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
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. Credit Suisse is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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