What if you bought Eli Lilly in 1990?
US Health · Pharma. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play112.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Eli Lilly at the start of 1990 would be worth about $112,500 today — 112.5 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Eli Lilly, the Indianapolis drugmaker that commercialised insulin in the 1920s, had a terrific 1990s on the back of Prozac, and the stock rose roughly eightfold. Prozac lost US patent protection in 2001, and the next decade was a slog: the antipsychotic Zyprexa drew lawsuits over side effects and marketing, and the shares fell by almost half between 2000 and 2010. Anyone who bought at the top of the first boom waited well over ten years to break even.
The second boom was much bigger. Lilly had a long history in diabetes, and its GLP-1 franchise moved from Trulicity to tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes from 2022 and as Zepbound for obesity from 2023. Demand for weight-loss drugs outstripped supply, Lilly spent heavily on new factories, and it overtook Novo Nordisk as the leader in the category. Its market value climbed toward a trillion dollars, making it the most valuable healthcare company on earth. Few positions in this game swing so dramatically depending on whether you started in 2000 or 2010.
The lesson: Starting point matters enormously: the same great company can deliver a lost decade or a fortune depending entirely on the price and year you first paid.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $8.00 | $112,500 | $19,429 | 112.5× |
| 1995 | $11.00 | $81,818 | $14,783 | 81.8× |
| 2000 | $65.00 | $13,846 | $4,626 | 13.8× |
| 2003 | $63.00 | $14,286 | $7,727 | 14.3× |
| 2005 | $56.00 | $16,071 | $5,763 | 16.1× |
| 2007 | $52.00 | $17,308 | $4,789 | 17.3× |
| 2008 | $53.00 | $16,981 | $4,626 | 17.0× |
| 2010 | $36.00 | $25,000 | $6,071 | 25.0× |
| 2012 | $41.00 | $21,951 | $5,312 | 22.0× |
| 2015 | $69.00 | $13,043 | $3,301 | 13.0× |
| 2018 | $85.00 | $10,588 | $2,519 | 10.6× |
| 2020 | $132 | $6,818 | $2,092 | 6.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $112,500. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. Eli Lilly is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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