What if you bought Deutsche Bank in 2000?
World · Germany. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.4× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Deutsche Bank at the start of 2000 would be worth about $400 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Deutsche Bank spent the 1990s and 2000s turning itself from a German commercial lender into a global investment bank, chasing returns on equity that would put it on a par with Wall Street. Ahead of 2008 it looked like a winner, and its shares hit record highs in 2007. It came through the financial crisis without a direct German state bailout, but its business model had been wounded.
The next decade was a slow-motion crisis. Deutsche paid billions over interest rate manipulation, sanctions breaches, mortgage-backed securities and so-called mirror trades that helped move money out of Russia. It raised capital again and again through share issues, each one diluting existing shareholders, while low interest rates squeezed its German banking business. By 2020 the shares had lost around 95 percent from their peak. A restructuring under Christian Sewing, announced in 2019, cut tens of thousands of jobs and abandoned equities trading. Rising interest rates then restored profits, and from 2020 the shares roughly quadrupled, but buyers from the 2000s are still far behind.
The lesson: A stock that looks cheap after a big decline can keep getting cheaper when repeated capital raises dilute shareholders and fines keep arriving.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $80.00 | $400 | $4,626 | 0.4× |
| 2003 | $45.00 | $711 | $7,727 | 0.7× |
| 2005 | $85.00 | $376 | $5,763 | 0.4× |
| 2007 | $130 | $246 | $4,789 | 0.2× |
| 2008 | $130 | $246 | $4,626 | 0.2× |
| 2010 | $65.00 | $492 | $6,071 | 0.5× |
| 2012 | $40.00 | $800 | $5,312 | 0.8× |
| 2015 | $30.00 | $1,067 | $3,301 | 1.1× |
| 2018 | $19.00 | $1,684 | $2,519 | 1.7× |
| 2020 | $8.00 | $4,000 | $2,092 | 4.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $4,000. 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. Deutsche Bank is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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