What if you bought Snap in 2018?
US Tech · Social. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.5× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in Snap at the start of 2018 would be worth about $533 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Snap began in 2011 as Snapchat, an app for sending photos that disappeared, built by Stanford students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. It turned down a reported multi-billion-dollar offer from Facebook in 2013, which then copied its Stories feature on Instagram in 2016, an imitation that slowed Snap's growth markedly. The 2017 IPO offered shares with no voting rights at all, which investors accepted anyway.
The stock dipped below its IPO price within months, and a widely disliked app redesign in 2018 added to the gloom. Snap recovered strongly during the pandemic advertising boom, reaching a peak in 2021 well above its 2020 level, but Apple's privacy changes the same year undermined the targeted advertising Snap relied on, and in 2022 the shares lost more than 40 percent in a single day after a profit warning. The app kept hundreds of millions of daily users, mostly young, yet the company struggled to turn them into consistent profits. A 2018 buyer lost about half.
The lesson: Users are not the same as profits; Snap's large and loyal young audience never translated into the advertising economics that investors repeatedly assumed it would.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $15.00 | $533 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $17.00 | $471 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $533. 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. Snap is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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