What if you bought Nucor in 2000?
US Industry · Steel. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play15.0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Nucor at the start of 2000 would be worth about $15,000 today — 15.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Nucor is the steel company that did not behave like one. Instead of giant blast furnaces fed with iron ore, it built minimills that melt scrap in electric arc furnaces, which are cheaper to build, quicker to adjust and far less tied to unionised legacy costs. Under Ken Iverson it became famous for a tiny headquarters, flat management and pay heavily linked to output, and business schools held it up as a textbook case of disruption from below.
The price path still shows the cycle. Shares climbed steadily with the 2000s commodity boom, peaked around 2008, and then spent roughly a decade going sideways as Chinese overcapacity flattened steel prices. Unlike many rivals, Nucor stayed profitable through most downturns and kept raising its dividend, using the bad years to buy capacity cheaply. When steel prices exploded in 2021 and 2022, it earned record profits and the stock broke decisively higher. Compared with US Steel over the same years, it is a neat demonstration that within one ugly industry, the low-cost producer with a strong balance sheet can be a very different investment.
The lesson: Even in a brutal commodity industry, a structural cost advantage and conservative balance sheet can compound for decades while higher-cost rivals lurch from crisis to crisis.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $10.00 | $15,000 | $4,626 | 15.0× |
| 2003 | $10.00 | $15,000 | $7,727 | 15.0× |
| 2005 | $26.00 | $5,769 | $5,763 | 5.8× |
| 2007 | $32.00 | $4,688 | $4,789 | 4.7× |
| 2008 | $60.00 | $2,500 | $4,626 | 2.5× |
| 2010 | $47.00 | $3,191 | $6,071 | 3.2× |
| 2012 | $40.00 | $3,750 | $5,312 | 3.8× |
| 2015 | $49.00 | $3,061 | $3,301 | 3.1× |
| 2018 | $63.00 | $2,381 | $2,519 | 2.4× |
| 2020 | $56.00 | $2,679 | $2,092 | 2.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $15,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
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. Nucor is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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