What if you bought Ford in 1990?
US Consumer · Autos. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Ford at the start of 1990 would be worth about $1,500 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Ford entered 2000 riding the SUV boom, with the share price near record levels. It did not last. The Firestone tyre recall on the Explorer, rising pension and health-care obligations, and Japanese competition sent the shares sliding, and CEO Jacques Nasser was out by late 2001. By the mid-2000s Ford was losing billions a year.
In 2006 new CEO Alan Mulally, recruited from Boeing, mortgaged nearly everything Ford owned, including the blue oval logo, to raise a giant credit line. It looked desperate, but when the 2008 crisis hit, Ford had the cash to avoid the government-run bankruptcies that befell GM and Chrysler. The shares fell to around a dollar or two in late 2008, then recovered strongly. Since then Ford has been a story of steady trucks and uncertain everything else: the F-150 remained the cash machine, while its electric vehicle unit lost billions. A quarter century later, the share price was still below its 2000 level.
The lesson: Surviving without a bailout is admirable but not the same as compounding; a well-run turnaround can still leave a stock below where it started decades earlier.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $8.00 | $1,500 | $19,429 | 1.5× |
| 1995 | $10.00 | $1,200 | $14,783 | 1.2× |
| 2000 | $26.00 | $462 | $4,626 | 0.5× |
| 2003 | $9.00 | $1,333 | $7,727 | 1.3× |
| 2005 | $14.00 | $857 | $5,763 | 0.9× |
| 2007 | $7.50 | $1,600 | $4,789 | 1.6× |
| 2008 | $6.50 | $1,846 | $4,626 | 1.8× |
| 2010 | $10.00 | $1,200 | $6,071 | 1.2× |
| 2012 | $11.00 | $1,091 | $5,312 | 1.1× |
| 2015 | $15.00 | $800 | $3,301 | 0.8× |
| 2018 | $12.50 | $960 | $2,519 | 1.0× |
| 2020 | $9.30 | $1,290 | $2,092 | 1.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2008, turning $1,000 into $1,846. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
On this day
- 5 January 1914: Henry Ford announces the $5 workday
- 17 April 1964: Ford unveils the Mustang
- 27 September 1908: The first Model T rolls out
- 1 October 1908: Ford rolls out the Model T
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. Ford is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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