What if you bought Nasdaq 100 index fund in 1990?
Countries · USA. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play109.1× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Nasdaq 100 index fund at the start of 1990 would be worth about $109,091 today — 109.1 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
The Nasdaq 100 holds the hundred largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq exchange, which in practice means a bet on American technology. From 1990 to early 2000 it rose more than tenfold as PCs, networking gear and then anything with ".com" in its name attracted money. Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Oracle were briefly among the most valuable companies on earth.
The bust was brutal: by late 2002 the index had lost roughly four-fifths of its value, and it took the better part of fifteen years to climb back above its 2000 peak. Many of the stars of the bubble never recovered. But the survivors and their successors, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and later Nvidia, built businesses with enormous profits, and from 2009 onward the index left almost every other market behind. The same index produced both one of the worst decades and one of the best for buy-and-hold investors; the difference was mostly the entry price.
The lesson: A great industry bought at a crazy price can take fifteen years to break even, so the price paid matters even when the story turns out right.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $220 | $109,091 | $19,429 | 109.1× |
| 1995 | $400 | $60,000 | $14,783 | 60.0× |
| 2000 | $3,700 | $6,486 | $4,626 | 6.5× |
| 2003 | $1,000 | $24,000 | $7,727 | 24.0× |
| 2005 | $1,600 | $15,000 | $5,763 | 15.0× |
| 2007 | $1,750 | $13,714 | $4,789 | 13.7× |
| 2008 | $2,100 | $11,429 | $4,626 | 11.4× |
| 2010 | $1,850 | $12,973 | $6,071 | 13.0× |
| 2012 | $2,300 | $10,435 | $5,312 | 10.4× |
| 2015 | $4,200 | $5,714 | $3,301 | 5.7× |
| 2018 | $6,500 | $3,692 | $2,519 | 3.7× |
| 2020 | $8,700 | $2,759 | $2,092 | 2.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $109,091. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
On this day
- 8 February 1971: Nasdaq opens for business
- 10 March 2000: The Nasdaq peaks at 5,048
- 14 April 2000: The Nasdaq drops nearly 10% in a day
- 10 June 2020: The Nasdaq closes above 10,000
- 9 August 1995: Netscape's IPO kicks off the dot-com era
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. Nasdaq 100 index fund is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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