What if you bought Evergrande in 2010?
World · China. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $6,071
Every dollar is gone. Evergrande was delisted in 2025 with $300bn of debt, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Evergrande, founded by Hui Ka Yan in Guangzhou in 1996, became the poster child of China's property boom. It listed in Hong Kong in 2009, built hundreds of projects in smaller cities, and financed them with bank loans, offshore dollar bonds, wealth-management products sold to its own employees, and deposits from buyers of homes not yet built. It also diversified with ambition: a championship football club, bottled water, theme parks and an electric-car unit that had yet to sell cars in volume. The shares rose sharply in 2017, briefly making Hui one of Asia's richest people.
In 2020 Beijing introduced its three red lines, limits on developer leverage designed to deflate exactly this model. Evergrande could no longer roll its debts, and in 2021 it missed bond payments and defaulted, with liabilities of around $300 billion. Construction halted, homebuyers staged mortgage boycotts, Hui was detained in 2023, and a Hong Kong court ordered the company liquidated in January 2024. The shares were delisted in 2025, worth nothing.
The lesson: Leverage turns a policy change into a death sentence; a company financed by perpetual refinancing fails the day the refinancing stops.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $4.00 | $0 | $6,071 | — |
| 2012 | $3.50 | $0 | $5,312 | — |
| 2015 | $3.50 | $0 | $3,301 | — |
| 2018 | $25.00 | $0 | $2,519 | — |
| 2020 | $21.00 | $0 | $2,092 | — |
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 2010 would be $6,071 today.
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. Evergrande is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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