What if you bought Sensex in 1990?
Countries · India. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play105.1× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Sensex at the start of 1990 would be worth about $105,128 today — 105.1 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
The Sensex tracks thirty large companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange, India's oldest. The 1990 start predates the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, which forced economic liberalisation: tariffs fell, licences were scrapped and foreign investors were let in. Markets boomed, then crashed in 1992 when the Harshad Mehta securities scam came to light, the first of several episodes that made Indian stocks a volatile place to be.
The 2000s brought an IT services boom led by Infosys, TCS and Wipro, and a commodity-fuelled rally that ended abruptly in 2008. Since then the index has climbed more or less steadily, helped by a growing middle class, monthly savings plans that funnelled domestic money into equities, and reforms such as the 2017 national goods and services tax. One caveat for foreign investors: the rupee weakened substantially against the dollar over these decades, so returns in dollars were considerably lower than the index level suggests.
The lesson: Strong local-currency returns can shrink a lot once converted back, so currency depreciation belongs in any honest calculation of emerging market gains.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $780 | $105,128 | $19,429 | 105.1× |
| 1995 | $3,900 | $21,026 | $14,783 | 21.0× |
| 2000 | $5,000 | $16,400 | $4,626 | 16.4× |
| 2003 | $3,400 | $24,118 | $7,727 | 24.1× |
| 2005 | $6,600 | $12,424 | $5,763 | 12.4× |
| 2007 | $13,800 | $5,942 | $4,789 | 5.9× |
| 2008 | $20,300 | $4,039 | $4,626 | 4.0× |
| 2010 | $17,500 | $4,686 | $6,071 | 4.7× |
| 2012 | $15,500 | $5,290 | $5,312 | 5.3× |
| 2015 | $27,500 | $2,982 | $3,301 | 3.0× |
| 2018 | $34,000 | $2,412 | $2,519 | 2.4× |
| 2020 | $41,300 | $1,985 | $2,092 | 2.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $105,128. 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. Sensex is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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