What if you bought John Deere in 1990?
US Industry · Machines. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play125.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in John Deere at the start of 1990 would be worth about $125,000 today — 125.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Deere & Company has made farm machinery since John Deere's steel plough in the 1830s, and its green tractors are a fixture of American agriculture. Its fortunes track farm incomes, which track crop prices. In the 2000s rising grain demand from emerging markets and the US ethanol mandate pushed corn prices up, farmers bought equipment, and Deere's shares climbed to a 2008 peak before falling sharply in the crisis.
Deere then turned itself into something closer to a technology company. GPS-guided tractors, sensors and software allowed precision farming, and it bought machine-learning startup Blue River Technology in 2017 for its 'see and spray' weed-detection systems. That technology also made Deere a target in the right-to-repair debate, as farmers complained they could not fix their own machines; the Federal Trade Commission sued in 2025. Strong crop prices after the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to record profits, and investors began valuing Deere's tech and pricing power, lifting the shares far above their 2020 level.
The lesson: Old industrial companies can earn higher valuations by embedding software and data; the market rewards recurring advantages more than cyclical revenue.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $4.00 | $125,000 | $19,429 | 125.0× |
| 1995 | $11.00 | $45,455 | $14,783 | 45.5× |
| 2000 | $21.00 | $23,810 | $4,626 | 23.8× |
| 2003 | $23.00 | $21,739 | $7,727 | 21.7× |
| 2005 | $37.00 | $13,514 | $5,763 | 13.5× |
| 2007 | $47.00 | $10,638 | $4,789 | 10.6× |
| 2008 | $93.00 | $5,376 | $4,626 | 5.4× |
| 2010 | $55.00 | $9,091 | $6,071 | 9.1× |
| 2012 | $78.00 | $6,410 | $5,312 | 6.4× |
| 2015 | $88.00 | $5,682 | $3,301 | 5.7× |
| 2018 | $156 | $3,205 | $2,519 | 3.2× |
| 2020 | $173 | $2,890 | $2,092 | 2.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $125,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. John Deere is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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