What if you bought Shopify in 2018?
US Tech · E-commerce. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play15.0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in Shopify at the start of 2018 would be worth about $15,000 today — 15.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Shopify began in Ottawa in the mid-2000s when Tobias Lutke, a German programmer, built his own software to sell snowboards online because the existing tools were terrible. The software turned out to be the better business. Shopify let small merchants set up a store, take payments and manage stock without hiring developers, and earned money from subscriptions plus a cut of transactions. It listed in 2015, and by 2018 had built a reputation as the anti-Amazon, arming independent sellers rather than competing with them.
The pandemic turbocharged everything: shops closed, merchants rushed online, and Shopify briefly became Canada's most valuable company. In 2022 the bill came due. Online shopping growth normalised, the shares fell by roughly four fifths from their peak, and Lutke admitted he had bet wrongly that the pandemic shift would last. Shopify cut staff, sold its costly logistics business to Flexport in 2023 and refocused on software. Margins improved and the stock recovered much of its losses by 2026.
The lesson: Extrapolating a one-off surge is dangerous; Shopify's own founder treated pandemic e-commerce growth as permanent and had to reverse course within two years.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $10.00 | $15,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $40.00 | $3,750 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $15,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,519.
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. Shopify is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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