What if you bought Goldman Sachs in 2000?
US Finance · Bank. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play8.2× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Goldman Sachs at the start of 2000 would be worth about $8,182 today — 8.2 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Goldman Sachs went public in 1999, ending more than a century as a partnership, and spent the next decade as the gold standard of Wall Street trading and dealmaking. The dot-com bust dented it, but the 2003 to 2007 boom in credit and leverage was spectacular for its profits. It famously bet against parts of the mortgage market as the bubble burst.
That did not make 2008 comfortable. In September, Goldman converted into a bank holding company to gain Federal Reserve backing, took a five-billion-dollar investment from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and accepted government bailout funds. Public anger followed, along with an SEC fraud case over a mortgage product called Abacus, settled in 2010. New rules on capital and proprietary trading squeezed returns, and the shares traded below their 2007 level well into the 2010s. Later came the 1MDB bribery scandal in Malaysia and an expensive, ultimately scaled-back push into consumer banking. Yet the core franchise endured, and after a long sideways spell the stock rose strongly into 2026.
The lesson: Reputation and returns can diverge for years; an elite franchise can lose public trust and still compound, provided its core business keeps earning.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $88.00 | $8,182 | $4,626 | 8.2× |
| 2003 | $70.00 | $10,286 | $7,727 | 10.3× |
| 2005 | $105 | $6,857 | $5,763 | 6.9× |
| 2007 | $200 | $3,600 | $4,789 | 3.6× |
| 2008 | $215 | $3,349 | $4,626 | 3.3× |
| 2010 | $170 | $4,235 | $6,071 | 4.2× |
| 2012 | $92.00 | $7,826 | $5,312 | 7.8× |
| 2015 | $195 | $3,692 | $3,301 | 3.7× |
| 2018 | $255 | $2,824 | $2,519 | 2.8× |
| 2020 | $230 | $3,130 | $2,092 | 3.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $10,286. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
On this day
- 16 April 2010: The SEC charges Goldman Sachs with fraud
- 4 May 1999: Goldman Sachs finally goes public
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. Goldman Sachs is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Finance
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