What if you bought GameStop in 2003?
Hype · Meme stock. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play10.0× · S&P 500 same money: $7,727
$1,000 in GameStop at the start of 2003 would be worth about $10,000 today — 10.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
GameStop was a mall retailer that sold new and second-hand video games, profiting handsomely from trade-ins during the console booms of the 2000s. Its shares rose through 2007, but the shift to digital downloads slowly undermined the business, and by 2019 the stock traded at a few dollars amid store closures and losses. Several hedge funds shorted it heavily, at one point more shares than were available to trade.
In 2020 Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen took a stake, and a retail investor known online as Roaring Kitty argued the stock was undervalued. In January 2021 users of Reddit's WallStreetBets piled in, sparking a short squeeze that sent the shares up many times within days and inflicted heavy losses on funds such as Melvin Capital. Robinhood restricted purchases, prompting congressional hearings. GameStop used the moment to sell new shares and raise billions in cash, and in 2025 even bought bitcoin. The store business kept shrinking, but the company survived.
The lesson: Crowded short positions can produce explosive squeezes, but price spikes driven by flows rather than fundamentals rarely persist for late buyers.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | $2.50 | $10,000 | $7,727 | 10.0× |
| 2005 | $5.00 | $5,000 | $5,763 | 5.0× |
| 2007 | $13.00 | $1,923 | $4,789 | 1.9× |
| 2008 | $14.00 | $1,786 | $4,626 | 1.8× |
| 2010 | $5.50 | $4,545 | $6,071 | 4.5× |
| 2012 | $6.00 | $4,167 | $5,312 | 4.2× |
| 2015 | $8.50 | $2,941 | $3,301 | 2.9× |
| 2018 | $4.50 | $5,556 | $2,519 | 5.6× |
| 2020 | $1.50 | $16,667 | $2,092 | 16.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $16,667. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
- 26 January 2021: Elon Musk tweets one word: Gamestonk
- 28 January 2021: Robinhood stops the GameStop rally
- 18 February 2021: Congress grills the GameStop crowd
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. GameStop is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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