What if you bought Target in 1990?
US Consumer · Retail. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play33.3× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Target at the start of 1990 would be worth about $33,333 today — 33.3 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Target, renamed from Dayton Hudson in 2000, built its brand on being the discount store with taste: designer collaborations, decent own brands and stores that felt less like a warehouse than Walmart's. The shares climbed steadily through the 1990s and mid-2000s, slumped with consumer spending in 2008, and then plodded sideways for years.
The 2010s brought self-inflicted wounds. A large 2013 data breach exposed tens of millions of customers' card details, and an ambitious expansion into Canada, launched that same year with empty shelves and supply-chain chaos, was abandoned within about two years at a cost of billions. A turnaround focused on remodeled stores and same-day pickup paid off spectacularly in the pandemic, when the stock roughly doubled. Then the tide went out: a 2022 inventory glut crushed margins, and political backlash from both sides, over Pride merchandise in 2023 and over rolling back diversity programs in 2025, hurt traffic. In 2026 the shares rebounded as investors warmed to a turnaround plan under new chief executive Michael Fiddelke.
The lesson: A pandemic windfall is not a new baseline; extrapolating an extraordinary year into the future is a reliable way to overpay for a retailer.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $3.00 | $33,333 | $19,429 | 33.3× |
| 1995 | $6.00 | $16,667 | $14,783 | 16.7× |
| 2000 | $35.00 | $2,857 | $4,626 | 2.9× |
| 2003 | $30.00 | $3,333 | $7,727 | 3.3× |
| 2005 | $52.00 | $1,923 | $5,763 | 1.9× |
| 2007 | $57.00 | $1,754 | $4,789 | 1.8× |
| 2008 | $50.00 | $2,000 | $4,626 | 2.0× |
| 2010 | $48.00 | $2,083 | $6,071 | 2.1× |
| 2012 | $51.00 | $1,961 | $5,312 | 2.0× |
| 2015 | $76.00 | $1,316 | $3,301 | 1.3× |
| 2018 | $65.00 | $1,538 | $2,519 | 1.5× |
| 2020 | $128 | $781 | $2,092 | 0.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $33,333. 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. Target is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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