What if you bought Pfizer in 1990?
US Health · Pharma. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play10.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Pfizer at the start of 1990 would be worth about $10,400 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Pfizer spent the 1990s as one of the great growth stories in pharma. Viagra arrived in 1998, the cholesterol drug Lipitor became the best-selling medicine in the world, and Pfizer bought Lipitor's developer, Warner-Lambert, in 2000. By then the shares had risen more than tenfold in a decade and traded at a valuation that assumed this would continue. It did not.
The 2000s became a long lesson in patent cliffs. Pfizer kept buying growth, absorbing Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth in 2009, while its own pipeline struggled and Lipitor's patent expired in 2011. The stock ended 2010 well below where it started the decade. Slow recovery followed, along with portfolio reshuffles such as spinning off animal health as Zoetis and the Upjohn generics unit into Viatris. Then came Covid: the BioNTech-partnered vaccine and the pill Paxlovid produced the biggest revenue years in the company's history. They also proved temporary, and as pandemic sales collapsed and the Seagen acquisition added debt, the shares fell back below where they had been in 2000.
The lesson: Owning a dominant, highly profitable company is not enough if you pay a price that already assumes its best decade will repeat indefinitely.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $2.50 | $10,400 | $19,429 | 10.4× |
| 1995 | $5.00 | $5,200 | $14,783 | 5.2× |
| 2000 | $32.00 | $812 | $4,626 | 0.8× |
| 2003 | $30.00 | $867 | $7,727 | 0.9× |
| 2005 | $27.00 | $963 | $5,763 | 1.0× |
| 2007 | $26.00 | $1,000 | $4,789 | 1.0× |
| 2008 | $23.00 | $1,130 | $4,626 | 1.1× |
| 2010 | $18.00 | $1,444 | $6,071 | 1.4× |
| 2012 | $21.00 | $1,238 | $5,312 | 1.2× |
| 2015 | $31.00 | $839 | $3,301 | 0.8× |
| 2018 | $36.00 | $722 | $2,519 | 0.7× |
| 2020 | $39.00 | $667 | $2,092 | 0.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $10,400. 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. Pfizer is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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