What if you bought Peloton in 2020?
Hype · Pandemic darling. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.2× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Peloton at the start of 2020 would be worth about $214 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Peloton sold internet-connected exercise bikes, later treadmills, with a monthly subscription to live and recorded classes led by charismatic instructors. It went public in September 2019, and a famously awkward Christmas advert that year made it a punchline. Then the pandemic closed gyms, and Peloton became one of the defining stay-at-home trades: demand outstripped supply, the company invested heavily in factories and logistics, and its share price climbed many times over by early 2021.
The reversal was swift. In 2021 a child died in an accident involving the Tread+, leading to a recall. As gyms reopened, demand fell sharply just as the company had expanded capacity, leaving it with excess inventory and heavy losses. Co-founder John Foley stepped down as CEO in 2022, followed by rounds of layoffs, price changes and a strategy shift towards subscriptions and rentals. By the mid-2020s the shares traded far below the IPO price, a long way from the lockdown peak.
The lesson: Extrapolating a temporary demand surge is a classic error, especially when a company expands capacity to meet demand that will not last.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $28.00 | $214 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $214. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
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. Peloton is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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