What if you bought Fitbit in 2015?
Hype · Gadget. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.2× · S&P 500 same money: $3,301
$1,000 in Fitbit at the start of 2015 would be worth about $245 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
What happened: Fitbit was bought by Google in 2021.
The story
Fitbit made clip-on and wrist-worn activity trackers that counted steps and sleep, kick-starting the wearables category. It went public in June 2015 and its shares jumped well above the offer price, briefly giving it a valuation in the billions as a fitness-tracker on every wrist seemed inevitable.
Unfortunately Apple launched the Apple Watch in 2015, and Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi sold cheap trackers by the million. Fitbit's revenue declined, it bought smartwatch startup Pebble's assets in 2016 and tried to move into health services, but the stock fell steeply within two years. In 2019 Google agreed to buy the company for $7.35 per share; regulatory reviews, focused largely on what Google would do with users' health data, delayed the deal until early 2021. Investors who bought at the IPO peak lost most of their money, while late buyers made a modest profit from the takeover.
The lesson: Being first to a category offers little protection when much larger platforms decide to enter, and a buyout price can fix losses permanently.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $30.00 | $245 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $5.70 | $1,289 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $6.60 | $1,114 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $1,289. 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. Fitbit is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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