What if you bought eToys in 2000?
US Tech · Internet. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
Every dollar is gone. eToys went bankrupt in 2001, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
eToys was one of the purest expressions of the 1999 internet mood: an online toy store that went public in May 1999 and finished its first trading day valued at several billion dollars, more than Toys R Us, which had actual stores, actual profits and decades of supplier relationships. The pitch was that shopping from the sofa would eat physical retail, and the market priced that future as if it had already arrived.
The problem was arithmetic. Toys are bulky, cheap, intensely seasonal and sold at thin margins, so every holiday rush meant warehouses, shipping costs and customer-service headaches that scaled faster than revenue. After a rocky 1999 Christmas the company kept spending to build distribution capacity just as the dot-com funding window slammed shut in 2000. With losses mounting and no new capital available, eToys filed for bankruptcy in early 2001 and shareholders were wiped out. The brand name itself lived on, passed to KB Toys, which tells you what the business was worth once the story was removed.
The lesson: A correct prediction about the future (people will buy toys online) is worthless if the company you back runs out of cash before that future pays.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $25.00 | $0 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2000 would be $4,626 today.
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. eToys is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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