What if you bought Wheat (bushel) in 1990?
Commodities · Grain. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Wheat (bushel) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $1,375 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Wheat is the world's most traded food grain, priced on the Chicago Board of Trade, and it is a story of weather, export bans and wars. The 1990s and early 2000s were a period of surplus and low prices. Then came the 2007-2008 food crisis: drought in Australia, rising demand for biofuel crops and a cascade of export restrictions pushed wheat to records, fuelling food riots in several countries. In 2010 a severe drought led Russia to ban grain exports, and the resulting bread-price spike is often cited as one of the pressures behind the Arab Spring.
Russia and Ukraine together became major exporters, so the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent prices to near-record levels as Black Sea shipping froze, before a grain corridor and large harvests elsewhere brought them back down. Across the entire period wheat ended only modestly above where it started in 1990, which, after three and a half decades of inflation, means a substantial loss in real terms despite repeated headlines about soaring food prices.
The lesson: A nominal price chart flatters anything that merely stands still; wheat barely rose from its 1990 level, which after inflation amounts to a significant real loss.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $4.00 | $1,375 | $19,429 | 1.4× |
| 1995 | $3.80 | $1,447 | $14,783 | 1.4× |
| 2000 | $2.50 | $2,200 | $4,626 | 2.2× |
| 2003 | $3.30 | $1,667 | $7,727 | 1.7× |
| 2005 | $3.10 | $1,774 | $5,763 | 1.8× |
| 2007 | $4.80 | $1,146 | $4,789 | 1.1× |
| 2008 | $9.00 | $611 | $4,626 | 0.6× |
| 2010 | $5.30 | $1,038 | $6,071 | 1.0× |
| 2012 | $6.50 | $846 | $5,312 | 0.8× |
| 2015 | $5.90 | $932 | $3,301 | 0.9× |
| 2018 | $4.30 | $1,279 | $2,519 | 1.3× |
| 2020 | $5.60 | $982 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $2,200. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
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. Wheat (bushel) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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