What if you bought DAX in 1990?
Countries · Germany. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play13.3× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in DAX at the start of 1990 would be worth about $13,333 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
The DAX tracks forty of Germany's largest listed companies (thirty until 2021): carmakers, chemical giants, insurers, Siemens, SAP. Unusually, it is a performance index, meaning dividends are assumed to be reinvested, which flatters it in comparisons with price-only indices like the FTSE or the S&P 500. In the late 1990s Germany caught the dot-com fever too, complete with a tech segment called the Neuer Markt that collapsed so thoroughly it was shut down in 2003, and the DAX fell by more than half.
The 2000s brought labour market reforms and an export machine that sold cars and machine tools to a booming China. The index halved again in the 2008 crisis and wobbled during the euro debt crisis, but recovered strongly as German exporters thrived. Embarrassments followed: the Volkswagen diesel scandal in 2015 and the 2020 collapse of Wirecard, a DAX member that turned out to be missing about 1.9 billion euros. Despite a weak domestic economy in the 2020s, the index reached record highs, carried by global earners such as SAP.
The lesson: An index can boom while its home economy stagnates, because large listed companies earn their money worldwide and are not a proxy for national growth.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1,800 | $13,333 | $19,429 | 13.3× |
| 1995 | $2,100 | $11,429 | $14,783 | 11.4× |
| 2000 | $6,900 | $3,478 | $4,626 | 3.5× |
| 2003 | $2,900 | $8,276 | $7,727 | 8.3× |
| 2005 | $4,250 | $5,647 | $5,763 | 5.6× |
| 2007 | $6,600 | $3,636 | $4,789 | 3.6× |
| 2008 | $8,000 | $3,000 | $4,626 | 3.0× |
| 2010 | $6,000 | $4,000 | $6,071 | 4.0× |
| 2012 | $6,000 | $4,000 | $5,312 | 4.0× |
| 2015 | $9,800 | $2,449 | $3,301 | 2.4× |
| 2018 | $13,000 | $1,846 | $2,519 | 1.8× |
| 2020 | $13,300 | $1,805 | $2,092 | 1.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $13,333. 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. DAX is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Countries
- What if you bought S&P 500 index fund?
- What if you bought Nasdaq 100 index fund?
- What if you bought Nikkei 225?
- What if you bought AEX?
- What if you bought FTSE 100?
- What if you bought Shanghai Composite?