There’s a ton of “if you had invested $1,000 in <successful stock> 25 years ago, you’d have x today!”, but sometimes it’s interesting to look at the rest of them.
What if you had invested in one of the most exciting growth names a century ago?
In 1926, the major market themes were aviation, office/industrial automation and electrification. One of the best performing big board stocks over the next 3 years was Burroughs Adding Machines - a company that made, you guessed it, adding machines.
It rode the proliferation of office work to a +1,996% gain over the next 168 weeks.
And it still survives today. It acquired Sperry Rand in 1986 and the combined company was renamed Unisys, which trades today as UIS.
If you had invested $1,000 in Burroughs Adding Machines in 1926, the shares would have been worth ~$20,900 at the 1929 peak. And $2,800 today.
But Burroughs, like many companies a century ago, was an aggressive dividend payer. Assuming you reinvested dividends, you’d have around $35,000 today.
Seems decent, you outperformed the consumer price index by about 85%. But you’ve underperformed the index by a factor of 640 to 1.
That same $1,000 invested in the S&P500 (or similar large cap U.S. index, using Shiller/BLS data) would be worth $22.4 million today.
An investor in 1926 picks a defining technology winner of their generation, a company that manages to continue to exist for a century. But a century was long enough to go through disruption -> hypergrowth -> dominance -> maturity -> tech transition -> renewed relevance -> consolidation -> new disruption -> terminal decline.
I don’t know exactly what the point is here but I find it pretty interesting considering most of the historical stock selection focuses on companies that survived and thrived.