What if you bought Merck in 1990?
US Health · Pharma. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play15.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Merck at the start of 1990 would be worth about $15,385 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Merck was America's most admired drugmaker in the late 1980s and 1990s, and its shares rose about fivefold through that decade. Then came Vioxx, a painkiller launched in 1999 and later linked to heart attacks and strokes. Merck pulled it in 2004, the stock dropped sharply in a day, and years of litigation followed, eventually settled for several billion dollars.
The company spent the next decade rebuilding. It merged with Schering-Plough in 2009, a deal that quietly brought along an antibody later developed as Keytruda. Approved in 2014, Keytruda became the dominant cancer immunotherapy and eventually the best-selling drug in the world, transforming Merck's economics and lifting the shares to records. The vaccine Gardasil added another engine, although its sales in China slumped in the mid-2020s. Merck also spun off women's health and older products as Organon in 2021. Today its story is bound up with the question every big drugmaker eventually faces: what happens when the blockbuster's patents expire. The path from 2000 shows how one failure and one accidental success can define a quarter-century.
The lesson: In pharmaceuticals a single product can make or break a decade, so even a giant can carry the concentrated risk of a small company.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $6.50 | $15,385 | $19,429 | 15.4× |
| 1995 | $13.00 | $7,692 | $14,783 | 7.7× |
| 2000 | $30.00 | $3,333 | $4,626 | 3.3× |
| 2003 | $25.00 | $4,000 | $7,727 | 4.0× |
| 2005 | $32.00 | $3,125 | $5,763 | 3.1× |
| 2007 | $43.00 | $2,326 | $4,789 | 2.3× |
| 2008 | $58.00 | $1,724 | $4,626 | 1.7× |
| 2010 | $36.00 | $2,778 | $6,071 | 2.8× |
| 2012 | $37.00 | $2,703 | $5,312 | 2.7× |
| 2015 | $57.00 | $1,754 | $3,301 | 1.8× |
| 2018 | $56.00 | $1,786 | $2,519 | 1.8× |
| 2020 | $91.00 | $1,099 | $2,092 | 1.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $15,385. 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. Merck is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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