What if you bought Zoom in 2020?
US Tech · Software. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.2× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Zoom at the start of 2020 would be worth about $1,176 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, an engineer who had worked on Cisco's WebEx and thought he could build video calls that simply worked. He was right, and unusually for a 2019 tech IPO, Zoom was already profitable when it listed. Then a pandemic made it a verb. In the spring of 2020 schools, offices, weddings and funerals moved onto Zoom, daily meeting participants rose from about ten million to hundreds of millions, and the company also discovered 'zoombombing' and its own security shortcomings.
At their 2020 peak the shares had risen roughly eightfold, briefly giving Zoom a valuation larger than many airlines combined. A planned acquisition of call-centre software firm Five9 collapsed in 2021. As offices reopened, growth slowed to a crawl, Microsoft Teams came bundled with Office, and the stock fell by about 85 percent from its peak. Zoom stayed profitable and accumulated a large cash pile, using some for buybacks. An investor who bought at the start of 2020 and held to 2026 ended up modestly ahead, having experienced a spectacular round trip.
The lesson: Price can overshoot even when the business delivers; Zoom's results during the pandemic were excellent, but its valuation assumed a peak that could not persist.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $68.00 | $1,176 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $1,176. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
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. Zoom is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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