What if you bought Texas Instruments in 1990?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play133.3× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Texas Instruments at the start of 1990 would be worth about $133,333 today — 133.3 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Texas Instruments is the company where Jack Kilby built one of the first integrated circuits in 1958, and for decades it also made calculators, defence electronics and computers. In the 1990s it sold off much of that to focus on chips, especially signal processors for mobile phones, which carried the stock to a dot-com peak in 2000 before it fell by about two thirds.
The smarter decision came later. TI withdrew from the mobile processor market around 2012 and concentrated on analog and embedded chips: unglamorous parts that manage power and sensors in cars, factories and appliances, sold to tens of thousands of customers at modest prices for many years at a time. It built its own 300-millimetre factories to make them cheaply and became known for a disciplined capital allocation policy and rising dividends. That steady model roughly quadrupled the shares between 2012 and 2020. Heavy spending on new US fabs and a weak industrial cycle in the mid-2020s made the more recent stretch flatter.
The lesson: Boring can be beautiful; Texas Instruments' shift from glamorous mobile chips to dull analog parts sold to thousands of customers produced steadier, more durable returns.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1.50 | $133,333 | $19,429 | 133.3× |
| 1995 | $3.50 | $57,143 | $14,783 | 57.1× |
| 2000 | $48.00 | $4,167 | $4,626 | 4.2× |
| 2003 | $15.00 | $13,333 | $7,727 | 13.3× |
| 2005 | $25.00 | $8,000 | $5,763 | 8.0× |
| 2007 | $29.00 | $6,897 | $4,789 | 6.9× |
| 2008 | $33.00 | $6,061 | $4,626 | 6.1× |
| 2010 | $26.00 | $7,692 | $6,071 | 7.7× |
| 2012 | $30.00 | $6,667 | $5,312 | 6.7× |
| 2015 | $53.00 | $3,774 | $3,301 | 3.8× |
| 2018 | $105 | $1,905 | $2,519 | 1.9× |
| 2020 | $128 | $1,562 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $133,333. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
On this day
- 6 February 1959: Jack Kilby files the integrated circuit patent
- 12 September 1958: Jack Kilby demonstrates the integrated circuit
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. Texas Instruments is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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