What if you bought Roku in 2018?
US Tech · Streaming. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.6× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in Roku at the start of 2018 would be worth about $1,600 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Roku was founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood, and its first streaming box was originally developed with Netflix, which decided not to make hardware itself. Roku's business model became an interesting inversion: sell the streaming sticks and TV software cheaply, then make money from advertising and a share of subscriptions sold through its platform. It went public in 2017 and became the leading TV operating system in the US.
The pandemic made Roku a darling as everyone stayed home to stream, and the stock surged far above its 2020 level in 2021. Then the comedown: streaming growth slowed, the advertising market weakened in 2022, and competition from Amazon, Google and TV makers' own software intensified. The shares fell more than 80 percent from their peak. Roku remained a major gateway to American living rooms, with tens of millions of active accounts, but profitability took time. A buyer in 2018 ended up ahead after a stomach-churning ride, while a 2020 buyer was well underwater.
The lesson: A strategic position is not the same as a profitable one; Roku controlled a key gateway to streaming but struggled to charge enough for it.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $50.00 | $1,600 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $135 | $593 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $1,600. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,519.
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. Roku is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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