What if you bought Moderna in 2020?
US Health · Biotech. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.6× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Moderna at the start of 2020 would be worth about $1,579 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Moderna was founded in 2010 to turn messenger RNA into medicines, raised huge sums privately, and listed in late 2018 in what was then the largest biotech IPO on record, without a single approved product. In early 2020 it was a speculative bet on a platform technology; within a year its Covid vaccine, developed in record time, made it a household name and a highly profitable company.
The stock rose more than twentyfold to a peak in the summer of 2021, briefly valuing Moderna above many established drugmakers. Then demand for Covid boosters faded, revenue collapsed, and newer products, including an RSV vaccine launched in 2024, sold far below expectations. The company cut costs and pipeline programmes as cash burn rose again. By 2025 the shares had given back nearly all of the boom. Then, in 2026, positive late-stage trial results for a personalised melanoma vaccine developed with Merck sent the shares soaring again. Almost everyone who owned it rode an extraordinary round trip, and the end-to-end number hides the most dramatic part of the story.
The lesson: Start and end prices can hide enormous swings in between, and a windfall is only truly earned if you have a rule for when to take it.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $19.00 | $1,579 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $1,579. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
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. Moderna is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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