What if you bought Enphase in 2015?
US Industry · Solar. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play2.5× · S&P 500 same money: $3,301
$1,000 in Enphase at the start of 2015 would be worth about $2,500 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Enphase Energy makes microinverters, small devices that convert electricity from each rooftop solar panel into household current, plus batteries and software for home energy systems. It went public in 2012, but the following years were rough: cheaper competition, thin margins and heavy losses brought it close to running out of cash around 2016-17, and the shares fell to a couple of dollars.
A new CEO, Badri Kothandaraman, took over in 2017 and focused relentlessly on cost and margins. The turnaround was dramatic. Revenue and profits surged, Enphase joined the S&P 500 in early 2021, and residential solar demand boomed with low interest rates, so the shares rose more than a hundredfold from their low at the peak in late 2022. Then the tide reversed. California's 2023 rooftop-solar rule change sharply reduced payments for exported electricity, higher interest rates made home solar loans expensive, and installers cut orders. By 2026 the shares had given up most of those gains, leaving them roughly back at their 2020 starting point.
The lesson: Spectacular rebounds can reverse just as quickly; a stock that rose a hundredfold on falling rates and subsidies is exposed when both move the other way.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $14.00 | $2,500 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $2.30 | $15,217 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $26.00 | $1,346 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $15,217. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,519.
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. Enphase is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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