What if you bought Ferrari F40 in 1990?
Alternatives · Car. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play7.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Ferrari F40 at the start of 1990 would be worth about $7,000 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
The Ferrari F40 was the last car personally approved by Enzo Ferrari before his death in 1988, a twin-turbo, stripped-down road racer with no radio, no carpets and very little mercy. Roughly 1,300 were built. In 1990 buying one meant arriving at the peak of a speculative classic car bubble: buyers had paid far above list price, and when the bubble burst in the early 1990s recession, values fell sharply.
The car spent the 1990s and 2000s as a merely expensive used Ferrari, slowly appreciating. In the 2010s, blue-chip classic cars became an asset class for the global wealthy, auction houses such as RM Sotheby's and Gooding set records, and the F40's analogue reputation grew as supercars went digital. Prices for clean, low-mileage examples climbed into the millions by the 2020s. The table excludes insurance, storage and specialist servicing, which for a car like this can be substantial, and any driving dramatically lowers value.
The lesson: A real asset bought at the peak of a bubble can take decades to recover, and costs of ownership reduce the actual return on any collectible.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $400,000 | $7,000 | $19,429 | 7.0× |
| 1995 | $250,000 | $11,200 | $14,783 | 11.2× |
| 2000 | $300,000 | $9,333 | $4,626 | 9.3× |
| 2003 | $350,000 | $8,000 | $7,727 | 8.0× |
| 2005 | $400,000 | $7,000 | $5,763 | 7.0× |
| 2007 | $500,000 | $5,600 | $4,789 | 5.6× |
| 2008 | $600,000 | $4,667 | $4,626 | 4.7× |
| 2010 | $550,000 | $5,091 | $6,071 | 5.1× |
| 2012 | $700,000 | $4,000 | $5,312 | 4.0× |
| 2015 | $1,200,000 | $2,333 | $3,301 | 2.3× |
| 2018 | $1,400,000 | $2,000 | $2,519 | 2.0× |
| 2020 | $1,500,000 | $1,867 | $2,092 | 1.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $11,200. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
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. Ferrari F40 is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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