What if you bought Xerox in 1995?
US Tech · Hardware. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.2× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Xerox at the start of 1995 would be worth about $167 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Xerox commercialised the plain-paper photocopier in 1959 and enjoyed a near monopoly so complete that its name became a verb. Its Palo Alto research lab invented much of modern computing, including the graphical interface, Ethernet and the laser printer, but the company famously let others, most notably Apple, profit from it. In the late 1990s the stock hit record highs, then collapsed by around 85 percent as debt, falling sales and an accounting scandal surfaced; Xerox later paid a penalty to the SEC and restated several years of results.
Anne Mulcahy steered the company away from bankruptcy, but the long decline of office printing never stopped. A large 2010 purchase of outsourcing firm ACS was later spun off as Conduent, a planned merger with Fujifilm's joint venture was derailed by activist investors in 2018, and a hostile bid for the much larger HP was abandoned in 2020. The 2025 acquisition of Lexmark added debt to a shrinking business, and the dividend was cut. By 2026 the shares had lost over 85 percent of their 2020 value.
The lesson: Inventing the future does not mean owning it; Xerox's lab created breakthroughs worth trillions to others while its own franchise depended on a fading product.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $30.00 | $167 | $14,783 | 0.2× |
| 2000 | $60.00 | $83.33 | $4,626 | 0.1× |
| 2003 | $8.00 | $625 | $7,727 | 0.6× |
| 2005 | $17.00 | $294 | $5,763 | 0.3× |
| 2007 | $17.00 | $294 | $4,789 | 0.3× |
| 2008 | $16.00 | $312 | $4,626 | 0.3× |
| 2010 | $8.50 | $588 | $6,071 | 0.6× |
| 2012 | $8.00 | $625 | $5,312 | 0.6× |
| 2015 | $14.00 | $357 | $3,301 | 0.4× |
| 2018 | $29.00 | $172 | $2,519 | 0.2× |
| 2020 | $37.00 | $135 | $2,092 | 0.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $625. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
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. Xerox is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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