What if you bought Nortel in 1995?
US Tech · Networks. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
Every dollar is gone. Nortel went bankrupt in 2009, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Nortel, formerly Northern Telecom, began as the equipment arm of Bell Canada and grew into one of the world's largest makers of telecom gear. During the fibre-optic boom it became a national champion: at its 2000 peak Nortel alone accounted for roughly a third of the value of Toronto's main stock index, and Canadian pension funds and individual investors held it heavily, often whether they intended to or not.
The bust was swift. In 2001 Nortel reported one of the largest corporate losses in history and cut tens of thousands of jobs, and the shares fell by over 95 percent. A partial recovery ended in an accounting scandal around 2004, when senior executives were fired over manipulated results linked to bonuses and the company restated earnings repeatedly. The 2007 price reflects a share consolidation, not a revival. Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009, and its assets were sold off, including a patent portfolio bought in 2011 by a consortium including Apple and Microsoft for about 4.5 billion dollars. Shareholders received nothing.
The lesson: Index concentration is a hidden risk; Canadian investors who simply tracked their home market were heavily exposed to one company that went to zero.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $6.00 | $0 | $14,783 | — |
| 2000 | $60.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
| 2003 | $2.00 | $0 | $7,727 | — |
| 2005 | $3.00 | $0 | $5,763 | — |
| 2007 | $25.00 | $0 | $4,789 | — |
| 2008 | $15.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 1995 would be $14,783 today.
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. Nortel is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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