What if you bought Intuitive Surgical in 2005?
US Health · Robots. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play111.1× · S&P 500 same money: $5,763
$1,000 in Intuitive Surgical at the start of 2005 would be worth about $111,111 today — 111.1 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Intuitive Surgical makes the da Vinci robot, a system that lets a surgeon sitting at a console manipulate tiny instruments inside a patient through small incisions. FDA clearance for general laparoscopic surgery came in 2000, and adoption for procedures like prostate removal and hysterectomy took off in the mid-2000s. The shares rose more than twentyfold from 2005 to 2008, a rare growth story in hospital equipment.
The business model is the real story: the robot is expensive, but each operation also uses disposable instruments and service contracts, so recurring revenue grows with every procedure. Growth was not smooth. Around 2013 and 2014 procedure growth slowed, lawsuits over injuries and an FDA warning letter weighed on the company, and the stock went sideways for several years. Competitors were long expected to break its dominance, yet most took far longer than expected. In 2024 it launched a new generation system, da Vinci 5. Over the entire period, the stock rose about a hundredfold, despite sometimes trading at valuations that looked hard to justify.
The lesson: A razor-and-blades model, where an installed base generates recurring revenue on every use, can justify valuations that look expensive on near-term earnings.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | $4.50 | $111,111 | $5,763 | 111.1× |
| 2007 | $32.00 | $15,625 | $4,789 | 15.6× |
| 2008 | $108 | $4,630 | $4,626 | 4.6× |
| 2010 | $100 | $5,000 | $6,071 | 5.0× |
| 2012 | $155 | $3,226 | $5,312 | 3.2× |
| 2015 | $175 | $2,857 | $3,301 | 2.9× |
| 2018 | $120 | $4,167 | $2,519 | 4.2× |
| 2020 | $200 | $2,500 | $2,092 | 2.5× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2005, turning $1,000 into $111,111. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,763.
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. Intuitive Surgical is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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