What if you bought Schlumberger in 1990?
US Industry · Oil services. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play3.3× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Schlumberger at the start of 1990 would be worth about $3,333 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Schlumberger, renamed SLB in 2022, is the world's largest oilfield services company, founded by two French brothers in the 1920s to measure rock formations using electricity. It provides the technology and crews that oil producers hire to find and drill wells. That makes it a leveraged bet on oil company spending: when prices rise, producers drill more and SLB gains; when they fall, budgets are cut first.
The 2000s oil boom carried the shares to a peak around 2008. SLB bought Smith International in 2010 and Cameron in 2016, building scale across drilling equipment. But the shale revolution favoured smaller, cheaper contractors in North America, and the 2014 oil crash slashed industry spending. Then 2020 delivered a second blow: SLB cut its dividend by three quarters and wrote down billions in assets. It refocused on international and offshore markets and on digital tools, plus carbon capture and geothermal. The share price in 2026 was well below where it stood in 2008, mirroring the industry's long retreat.
The lesson: Selling picks and shovels doesn't escape the cycle; suppliers to a cyclical industry usually feel its swings even more sharply than their customers do.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $12.00 | $3,333 | $19,429 | 3.3× |
| 1995 | $13.00 | $3,077 | $14,783 | 3.1× |
| 2000 | $28.00 | $1,429 | $4,626 | 1.4× |
| 2003 | $21.00 | $1,905 | $7,727 | 1.9× |
| 2005 | $34.00 | $1,176 | $5,763 | 1.2× |
| 2007 | $63.00 | $635 | $4,789 | 0.6× |
| 2008 | $98.00 | $408 | $4,626 | 0.4× |
| 2010 | $65.00 | $615 | $6,071 | 0.6× |
| 2012 | $68.00 | $588 | $5,312 | 0.6× |
| 2015 | $85.00 | $471 | $3,301 | 0.5× |
| 2018 | $67.00 | $597 | $2,519 | 0.6× |
| 2020 | $40.00 | $1,000 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $3,333. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. Schlumberger is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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