Many of us have heard tales of the mega rich, making millions overnight as companies go public in an almost Wolf of Wall Street fashion, and while we can look up at these people in envy it’s far more interesting to see just how feasible it is for your average Joe to join the ultra-elite. All by making a few simple (but well timed) investments.
Well the team over at Jolt have done exactly that and had a look back over the past three decades to see exactly what the best (and worst) tech investments have been, moreover what kind of money you could have made by sinking in just $1,000 of your savings when these companies went public. So, by spending a bit of your hard-earned cash you too could join the mega rich all without lifting a finger.
One surprising statistic to come out of jolt’s findings is that, although Apple might be the largest company in the tech industry and sitting on a literal mountain of cash your $1,000 would have only netted you a $288,622. This is still an extremely handsome amount, but if you had done the same for a few smaller companies at the time such as the likes of Oracle and Adobe, you would now have turned that $1,000 into a whopping $771,220 and $727,020 respectively.
On the other side of the spectrum, if you had invested into the social media giant Twitter back in 2013 your $1,000 would have shrunk down to just $406. It’s difficult to tell if and when the stock will recover, but some investors are still holding out in the long run. We very recently saw a similar story when the hyped-up Snapchat stock went onto the market, and in the span of 3 months that $1,000 would have dropped down to $744.
Perhaps the most painful out of these comes in relation to crypto-currencies, which aren’t completely comparable to company stocks but have still been the bane of many budding investment enthusiasts lately. If you had splashed that $1,000 onto some Bitcoin back in the early days of 2010 and managed to hold onto it all this time, that would now be worth an incredible $35 million dollars. You just have to remember not to throw it out, like this poor chap that accidentally lost almost $7 million dollars’ worth of Bitcoins when he replaced his computer!
So, have look through the infographic below, and see what investments you would have made in past, and who knows, maybe it’s not too late to get involved with some now and you will be on your way to fortune in the future.
(It’s worth noting the following figures all reflect the value of a stock based on a one-off investment of $1,000, where dividend payments have been reinvested and any stock splits considered. The total sum assumes that the entire holding is also sold in June 2017.)
