What if you bought General Electric in 2000?
US Industry · Conglomerate. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.7× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in General Electric at the start of 2000 would be worth about $737 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
At the start of 2000 General Electric was the most valuable company in the world, the conglomerate Jack Welch had built into a machine for delivering smooth, ever-rising earnings. Much of that smoothness came from GE Capital, a giant finance arm. Jeff Immelt took over just before 9/11, and the shares, priced for perfection, spent the next decade falling.
The 2008 crisis revealed how much GE resembled a bank: it needed federal debt guarantees, raised money from Warren Buffett and cut its dividend in 2009 for the first time since the Great Depression. Immelt sold most of GE Capital, but bets like the 2015 purchase of Alstom's power business went badly. In 2017-18 the dividend was cut almost to nothing, and GE was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Larry Culp, brought in from Danaher in 2018, sold assets, cut debt and split the company into three: GE HealthCare, GE Vernova and GE Aerospace. The remaining jet-engine business became a star, finally lifting the shares above their 2000 level.
The lesson: Earnings that look too smooth often hide leverage or accounting; the market eventually pays for transparency and punishes complexity.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $380 | $737 | $4,626 | 0.7× |
| 2003 | $190 | $1,474 | $7,727 | 1.5× |
| 2005 | $290 | $966 | $5,763 | 1.0× |
| 2007 | $300 | $933 | $4,789 | 0.9× |
| 2008 | $295 | $949 | $4,626 | 0.9× |
| 2010 | $120 | $2,333 | $6,071 | 2.3× |
| 2012 | $145 | $1,931 | $5,312 | 1.9× |
| 2015 | $200 | $1,400 | $3,301 | 1.4× |
| 2018 | $140 | $2,000 | $2,519 | 2.0× |
| 2020 | $90.00 | $3,111 | $2,092 | 3.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $3,111. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
- 15 February 1955: GE announces man-made diamonds
- 19 June 2018: GE is kicked out of the Dow
- 13 November 2017: GE cuts its dividend in half
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. General Electric is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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