What if you bought Wells Fargo in 1990?
US Finance · Bank. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play34.0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Wells Fargo at the start of 1990 would be worth about $34,000 today — 34.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Wells Fargo spent much of this period as the respectable bank. The modern company came from Norwest's 1998 merger with the old stagecoach-branded Wells, and it built a reputation for cross-selling checking accounts, mortgages and cards to the same customers. It avoided the worst investment-banking excesses of the 2000s and, during the 2008 crisis, swooped in to buy Wachovia, roughly doubling its branch network. Warren Buffett was a large, approving shareholder.
The cross-selling machine turned out to be the problem. In 2016 it emerged that employees under intense sales targets had opened millions of accounts customers never asked for. Further revelations followed in auto insurance and mortgages, the chief executive departed, Buffett eventually sold out, and in 2018 the Federal Reserve took the extraordinary step of capping the bank's total assets until it fixed its governance. The stock spent years going nowhere while rivals grew. The cap was finally lifted in 2025, by which point the shares had at last moved meaningfully above their pre-scandal highs.
The lesson: The metric management celebrates loudest can be the one employees are gaming; a culture problem eventually shows up in regulation, fines and a stalled share price.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $2.50 | $34,000 | $19,429 | 34.0× |
| 1995 | $6.00 | $14,167 | $14,783 | 14.2× |
| 2000 | $20.00 | $4,250 | $4,626 | 4.2× |
| 2003 | $23.00 | $3,696 | $7,727 | 3.7× |
| 2005 | $31.00 | $2,742 | $5,763 | 2.7× |
| 2007 | $36.00 | $2,361 | $4,789 | 2.4× |
| 2008 | $30.00 | $2,833 | $4,626 | 2.8× |
| 2010 | $27.00 | $3,148 | $6,071 | 3.1× |
| 2012 | $28.00 | $3,036 | $5,312 | 3.0× |
| 2015 | $55.00 | $1,545 | $3,301 | 1.5× |
| 2018 | $61.00 | $1,393 | $2,519 | 1.4× |
| 2020 | $53.00 | $1,604 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $34,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
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. Wells Fargo is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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