What if you bought Occidental in 1990?
US Industry · Oil. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play11.2× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Occidental at the start of 1990 would be worth about $11,250 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Occidental Petroleum was long associated with Armand Hammer, the colourful industrialist who ran it for decades. By 2000 it was a mid-sized oil producer with a chemicals arm, and the commodity boom transformed it into one of the best performers of the 2000s; the shares rose many times over as Occidental built a strong position in the Permian Basin and the Middle East, peaking in the early 2010s.
The defining moment came in 2019. CEO Vicki Hollub won a bidding war against Chevron for Anadarko Petroleum, paying a full price financed partly with 10 billion dollars of preferred stock sold to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway at an 8 percent dividend. Months later, the 2020 pandemic sent oil prices briefly negative, Occidental cut its dividend to a cent per share and its shares hit their lowest level in decades. Recovery came with higher oil prices from 2022, and Berkshire built a large common stake. Even so, the 2026 share price remained roughly half of its 2012 level.
The lesson: Paying top price for an acquisition with expensive financing leaves no margin of safety; timing a bet like that badly can scar a company for years.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $4.00 | $11,250 | $19,429 | 11.2× |
| 1995 | $5.00 | $9,000 | $14,783 | 9.0× |
| 2000 | $10.00 | $4,500 | $4,626 | 4.5× |
| 2003 | $14.00 | $3,214 | $7,727 | 3.2× |
| 2005 | $29.00 | $1,552 | $5,763 | 1.6× |
| 2007 | $49.00 | $918 | $4,789 | 0.9× |
| 2008 | $77.00 | $584 | $4,626 | 0.6× |
| 2010 | $82.00 | $549 | $6,071 | 0.5× |
| 2012 | $94.00 | $479 | $5,312 | 0.5× |
| 2015 | $80.00 | $562 | $3,301 | 0.6× |
| 2018 | $74.00 | $608 | $2,519 | 0.6× |
| 2020 | $41.00 | $1,098 | $2,092 | 1.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $11,250. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. Occidental is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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