If you had invested $10,000 in Nvidia at the time of its IPO, how much money would you have now?

Like many investors, I am a relative latecomer. NVIDIA (NVDA -0.36%) But I held onto the stock for a few years, long enough to make a huge profit.

Do I wish I had bought Nvidia stock sooner? Of course. They say hindsight is 20/20. But some investors were among the first to buy stock in the graphics processor unit (GPU) maker. If you’d invested $10,000 in Nvidia stock at its initial public offering (IPO), how much would you have today?

Party like it’s 1999

Nvidia was founded in April 1993. However, it wasn’t possible to invest in the company at the time. The company didn’t go public until January 22, 1999. Nvidia stock first traded at $12 per share.

From the beginning, Nvidia made GPUs, but as the initial “G” implies, these chips were focused on graphics: Nvidia sold GPUs to PC manufacturers specifically to support high-performance PC applications, primarily video games.

In early 1999, Nvidia was already experiencing impressive revenue growth: The company’s pre-IPO S1 filing revealed that sales for the nine months ending October 25, 1998, compared with the nine months ending September 28, 1997, had soared more than 15.7 times year-over-year (the different ending dates reflect changes in Nvidia’s fiscal year reporting).

But at the time, there was little confidence that NVIDIA would be successful in the long term: the company was losing money and facing stiff competition, including major threats. IntelNVIDIA was also embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with SGI, which is now owned by SGI. home pageThe company claimed that it had infringed its patents.

Persistence pays off

But let’s say that in January 1999, you believed that Nvidia would overcome the challenges. You weren’t worried about Intel or other rivals, and you thought that Nvidia had a good chance of winning its patent dispute with SGI. Your optimism led you to spend $10,000 to buy 833 shares of the GPU manufacturer’s stock.

By late 2001, your initial investment would have skyrocketed to more than $135,000. But Nvidia quickly hit rock bottom: the company’s stock price fell nearly 90% by early October 2002. Most investors probably would have exited by then. But let’s assume you continued to have strong conviction about Nvidia’s long-term prospects and didn’t sell any of your shares.

Of course, that was probably a wise decision. By late 2006, your Nvidia stock would have hit new highs. By October 1, 2007, your $10,000 would have grown to more than $230,000. But the euphoria didn’t last long. The financial crisis that began in late 2007 and continued into 2009 caused Nvidia’s stock price to plummet again by more than 80%.

It took Nvidia a few years to reach new highs, but since 2015, the stock price has skyrocketed. By late 2017, the initial investment had exceeded $1 million. This phenomenal success could have led some investors to book profits, but let’s assume they didn’t.

Again, that would have been a great move. By May 2020, you would have been a millionaire. And then generative AI exploded in 2023 and 2024. By the end of last year, your original $10,000 investment in Nvidia would have grown to over $12 million. If you had held all of your shares, your investment would have been worth more than (drum roll please)… today. $30 million.

NVDA data by YCharts

Should I invest $10,000 in Nvidia now?

Heartfelt kudos to all the investors who had the foresight to buy Nvidia early on, the patience to endure the heartbreaking downward spiral, and the foresight to not take their money and run when the company was doing well. But what about the many other investors who didn’t become millionaires by investing in Nvidia? Should you put $10,000 into the stock now?

You probably already know that the chances of a similar outcome are extremely low. Any The possibility of a stock repeating what Nvidia has accomplished is frightening.

Still, I believe that buying $10,000 worth of Nvidia stock now could pay off handsomely over the next 10 to 20 years, but I also believe other stocks offer a more attractive risk/reward profile than Nvidia.