What if you bought TotalEnergies in 2000?
World · France. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.9× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in TotalEnergies at the start of 2000 would be worth about $1,857 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
TotalEnergies, known as Total until 2021, became one of the oil supermajors through mergers with Belgium's Petrofina in 1999 and France's Elf Aquitaine in 2000. The early years were marked by disasters: the oil tanker Erika, which it had chartered, spilled oil on the coast of Brittany in 1999, and in 2001 an explosion at the AZF fertiliser plant in Toulouse, owned by a subsidiary, killed dozens of people.
The share price followed oil prices up to a peak around 2008, then spent most of the next fifteen years in a range. In 2014 its CEO Christophe de Margerie died in a plane crash at a Moscow airport. Under Patrick Pouyanné, Total leaned heavily into liquefied natural gas and renewable power, and renamed itself TotalEnergies in 2021. It was criticised for leaving Russia more slowly than peers after 2022, and its large Mozambique LNG project was halted for years by an insurgency. From 2000, the price roughly doubled, with much of the return coming from dividends.
The lesson: Commodity producers can spend a decade going sideways, so steady cash returns and a buyer's entry price often matter more than predicting the oil cycle.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $35.00 | $1,857 | $4,626 | 1.9× |
| 2003 | $30.00 | $2,167 | $7,727 | 2.2× |
| 2005 | $50.00 | $1,300 | $5,763 | 1.3× |
| 2007 | $70.00 | $929 | $4,789 | 0.9× |
| 2008 | $80.00 | $812 | $4,626 | 0.8× |
| 2010 | $60.00 | $1,083 | $6,071 | 1.1× |
| 2012 | $51.00 | $1,275 | $5,312 | 1.3× |
| 2015 | $51.00 | $1,275 | $3,301 | 1.3× |
| 2018 | $55.00 | $1,182 | $2,519 | 1.2× |
| 2020 | $55.00 | $1,182 | $2,092 | 1.2× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $2,167. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
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. TotalEnergies is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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