If you had bought NVDA in 2016 with $10,000...

NVIDIA designs graphics and accelerated-computing chips. It was founded in 1993 and spent its first decade known mainly for GeForce gaming graphics cards, but its defining decision was CUDA, released in 2006, which let general-purpose programs run on a GPU. That turned graphics hardware into the standard platform for deep learning, and the data-centre segment - GPUs, networking and the software stack around them - is now the larger part of its business. The shares trade on Nasdaq and sit in both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, so they also contribute to the index scenarios on this site. NVIDIA pays a small dividend, which a price-only comparison like this one leaves out.

NVIDIA went public in January 1999. Its price history contains several distinct eras: a gaming-hardware company through the 2000s, a period from 2016 when deep-learning demand first showed up in the numbers, a sharp crypto-mining boom and bust in 2018, and the generative-AI demand that began in 2023. Drawdowns have been severe more than once - the stock fell by roughly half in 2018 and again in 2022 before each recovery. Two recent splits matter when reading long-run charts: four-for-one in July 2021 and ten-for-one in June 2024. Together they mean a single share bought before 2021 corresponds to forty shares today, so any unadjusted historical price is off by that factor.

NVIDIA is the clearest case where the answer depends entirely on when you stopped watching. An entry in 2016 and an entry in 2022 are both 'early' by most people's memory, and they produce completely different numbers. The benchmark comparison shown alongside is the honest control: it shows how much of the result was the company and how much was the market it sat in.