What if you bought Domino's in 2005?
US Consumer · Food. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play24.7× · S&P 500 same money: $5,763
$1,000 in Domino's at the start of 2005 would be worth about $24,706 today — 24.7 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Domino's Pizza was taken private by Bain Capital in 1998 and listed again in 2004, carrying lots of debt. By 2008, as the recession hit, the stock had fallen to the single digits, and the pizza was widely seen as mediocre. Then the company did something unusual: in a 2009 and 2010 advertising campaign, it essentially admitted its pizza was bad and announced a new recipe.
The candor worked, but the real transformation was technology. Domino's invested early and heavily in online and mobile ordering, a real-time pizza tracker and ordering from almost any gadget with a screen, until analysts half-jokingly described it as a tech company that happened to sell pizza. With mostly franchised stores and an efficient supply chain, it became one of the best-performing stocks of the 2010s: from around eight dollars in 2010 to several hundred by 2020. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a stake in 2024. More recently, growth slowed as delivery apps and rivals caught up, and the stock moved more modestly.
The lesson: Admitting a product's weakness and fixing it can be more powerful than marketing spin; operational excellence compounds when the business model is asset-light.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | $17.00 | $24,706 | $5,763 | 24.7× |
| 2007 | $28.00 | $15,000 | $4,789 | 15.0× |
| 2008 | $13.00 | $32,308 | $4,626 | 32.3× |
| 2010 | $8.50 | $49,412 | $6,071 | 49.4× |
| 2012 | $34.00 | $12,353 | $5,312 | 12.4× |
| 2015 | $95.00 | $4,421 | $3,301 | 4.4× |
| 2018 | $190 | $2,211 | $2,519 | 2.2× |
| 2020 | $295 | $1,424 | $2,092 | 1.4× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2010, turning $1,000 into $49,412. The S&P 500 from that same year: $6,071.
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. Domino's is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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