What if you bought Crude oil (barrel) in 1990?
Commodities · Energy. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play3.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Crude oil (barrel) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $2,955 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Crude oil is the commodity that moves everything else. The period opens with the price spike of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, then a long, cheap 1990s that ended near $10 a barrel during the 1998 Asian crisis. From there, Chinese demand and stagnant supply drove an extraordinary climb, peaking around $147 in July 2008, before the financial crisis cut it by roughly three quarters within months. It recovered to around $100 by 2011-2014, until the American shale revolution and OPEC's decision in late 2014 to defend market share rather than prices sent it tumbling.
The strangest moment came in April 2020: with the pandemic closing economies and storage tanks full, the expiring US benchmark futures contract briefly traded below zero, meaning sellers paid buyers to take oil away. Two years later Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed prices above $100 again. Brent ended 2025 near $61, little changed from the mid-2000s, before conflict involving Iran pushed it back toward $90 in 2026. Despite all that drama, $1,000 in oil at the start of this period roughly tripled; few asset charts have a more exhausting route to a modest destination.
The lesson: You cannot easily own oil itself, only futures contracts; the negative print of April 2020 showed that storage and contract mechanics can dominate supply and demand.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $22.00 | $2,955 | $19,429 | 3.0× |
| 1995 | $18.00 | $3,611 | $14,783 | 3.6× |
| 2000 | $26.00 | $2,500 | $4,626 | 2.5× |
| 2003 | $32.00 | $2,031 | $7,727 | 2.0× |
| 2005 | $43.00 | $1,512 | $5,763 | 1.5× |
| 2007 | $60.00 | $1,083 | $4,789 | 1.1× |
| 2008 | $95.00 | $684 | $4,626 | 0.7× |
| 2010 | $80.00 | $812 | $6,071 | 0.8× |
| 2012 | $100 | $650 | $5,312 | 0.7× |
| 2015 | $50.00 | $1,300 | $3,301 | 1.3× |
| 2018 | $60.00 | $1,083 | $2,519 | 1.1× |
| 2020 | $61.00 | $1,066 | $2,092 | 1.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $3,611. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
On this day
- 17 January 1991: Oil collapses as Desert Storm begins
- 20 March 2003: The Iraq War begins
- 20 April 2020: US oil prices go negative
- 11 July 2008: Oil peaks at $147 a barrel
- 29 August 2005: Hurricane Katrina hits the Gulf Coast
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. Crude oil (barrel) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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