What if you bought United Airlines (old) in 1990?
US Consumer · Airlines. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
Every dollar is gone. United Airlines (old) went bankrupt in 2002, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
In 1994 United's employees bought a majority stake in parent UAL Corporation in exchange for wage concessions, creating the largest employee-owned company in America. For a while it looked clever. Shares did well through the late 1990s, and a planned merger with US Airways in 2000 promised further dominance until antitrust concerns killed it in 2001.
Then everything went wrong at once. Two of the four hijacked planes on 9/11 were United flights, and air travel collapsed. United was already struggling with high labour costs after generous contracts, and in December 2002 UAL filed for Chapter 11, the biggest airline bankruptcy to that point. It stayed in bankruptcy for more than three years. In that time it terminated its pension plans, transferring them to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which hurt many of the same employees who had become owners. When United emerged in 2006, the old shares were cancelled. Employee ownership turned out to mean owning an airline at precisely the wrong time.
The lesson: Owning shares in your own employer concentrates your risk: your job and your savings can disappear in the same downturn.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $60.00 | $0 | $19,429 | — |
| 1995 | $45.00 | $0 | $14,783 | — |
| 2000 | $78.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
| 2003 | $1.50 | $0 | $7,727 | — |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 1990 would be $19,429 today.
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. United Airlines (old) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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