What if you bought Monster Beverage in 2003?
US Consumer · Drinks. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play300.0× · S&P 500 same money: $7,727
$1,000 in Monster Beverage at the start of 2003 would be worth about $300,000 today — 300.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Monster Beverage was, until 2012, a small juice company called Hansen Natural. In 2002 it launched Monster Energy, a supersized energy drink with a claw-mark logo, sold at a lower price per ounce than Red Bull and marketed through extreme sports and music. The stock's rise from a split-adjusted twenty cents in 2003 to well over a dollar in 2005 and around five by 2007 made it one of the best performing US stocks of its era.
The company kept growing through the 2008 recession and, in 2015, struck a deal with Coca-Cola, which took a substantial stake and handed Monster its energy drink brands in exchange for Monster's non-energy brands and access to Coke's global distribution system. Regulatory scrutiny over caffeine and health effects and lawsuits followed, but did not derail the business. The stock roughly quadrupled between 2012 and 2020. More recently, competition from new brands like Celsius caused worries along the way, but the shares still more than doubled between early 2020 and 2026.
The lesson: The best long-term returns often come from small companies in unglamorous niches that grow into category leaders, though such winners are rare and hard to spot early.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | $0.2 | $300,000 | $7,727 | 300.0× |
| 2005 | $1.40 | $42,857 | $5,763 | 42.9× |
| 2007 | $5.50 | $10,909 | $4,789 | 10.9× |
| 2008 | $9.00 | $6,667 | $4,626 | 6.7× |
| 2010 | $6.50 | $9,231 | $6,071 | 9.2× |
| 2012 | $15.00 | $4,000 | $5,312 | 4.0× |
| 2015 | $36.00 | $1,667 | $3,301 | 1.7× |
| 2018 | $62.00 | $968 | $2,519 | 1.0× |
| 2020 | $63.00 | $952 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $300,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
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. Monster Beverage is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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