Pick an asset, a date, and an amount. See what it would be worth today — with optional adjustment for inflation, so you compare real purchasing power, not just nominal dollars.
A note before you start:
The assets shown below are selected because they performed well historically. This is selection bias —
most assets did not perform like this. Many assets that looked equally promising in 2010 are now worth
nothing. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and historical returns cannot be replicated by
purchasing today. This tool is for illustration; it is not investment advice.
From $1,000 invested in 2015
Survivorship bias is real. The assets listed above are still trading. Many that looked equally promising in 2015 — Luna, FTT, dozens of mid-cap tech names — are at zero. The list of "what if you'd invested" stories is much shorter than the list of "what if you'd held that other thing."
Holding through drawdowns is psychologically brutal. Bitcoin dropped 84% in 2018 and 75% in 2022. NVDA fell 66% in 2022. Most people who "would have made" the returns above sold somewhere in those drawdowns.
Past returns don't predict future returns. Bitcoin compounded at 100%+ annually for a decade. It cannot do that for the next decade — the math runs out. The same applies to any asset on this list. Whatever return looked easy in hindsight is harder going forward.
Diversified portfolios exist for a reason. A well-constructed portfolio sacrifices the dream of catching the next 100x to make sure it doesn't catch the next zero either. That trade-off is what private wealth management is actually about.
Historical prices are end-of-year closing values sourced from public records (CoinGecko for cryptocurrencies, Yahoo Finance / Nasdaq historical data for equities, LBMA fixings for gold, S&P / TSX official index data). Inflation adjustment uses U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U index values. Figures are illustrative and may differ slightly from other sources due to differences in price-fixing methodology or rounding. Verify any specific number against an authoritative source before relying on it.