If You'd Put $1,000 Into Intel Stock 20 Years Ago, Here's What You'd Have Today

Imagine a company that has enjoyed overwhelming success in its key markets for ages, and also claims one of the most valuable and recognizable brands in the world. Indeed, this company is so important to both its sector and the broader economy that it's been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for nearly a quarter of a century. 

One would expect shares in this blue chip company to have been an outstanding buy-and-hold bet. And to be fair, for a good long while, they were. 

But that was then and this is now. 

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Unfortunately, the Dow Jones stock we're talking about is Intel (INTC). True, shares almost doubled in 2023, helped by a multi-billion-dollar cost-cutting campaign and the generalized euphoria surrounding all things tech and AI. 

Whether 2023 marks the inflection point Intel's long-suffering shareholders have been waiting for remains to be seen. Once upon a time, INTC was one of the best stocks on the planet. It will take more than one good quarter to return the company to its days of greatness. 

True, Intel still dominates in the markets for central processing units (CPUs) for PCs and servers, but it's been losing market share to rivals at an accelerating rate for some time. Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are just a couple of its formidable competitors. 

Where the semiconductor company really went wrong – apart from execution missteps and manufacturing delays over the past decade – is the way it missed out on some of the biggest changes in technology. Intel famously whiffed on mobile, and now Nvidia is already running away in generative artificial intelligence (AI).

It's been a curious ride for INTC investors. Thanks to its dot-com era heyday, Intel was one of the 30 best stocks in the world between 1990 and 2020. Over those three decades, INTC stock generated more than $340 billion in wealth for shareholders, or an annualized dollar weighted return of 16%, according to Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Alas, the past two decades of that 30-year span have been another story entirely. 

The bottom line on Intel stock?

If you go all the way back to Intel's debut in the early 1970s as a publicly traded company, it beats the broader market handily. The chipmaker's annualized all-time total return (price change plus dividends) stands at 16.7%. The S&P 500's annualized total return comes to 10.3% over the same time period.

Sadly, if you look at pretty much any other standardized period, an investment in INTC has been a major dud. 

Intel stock lags the S&P 500 by nearly 6 percentage points over the past 20 years. It trails the broader market by 6 and 4 percentage points over the past 15 years and 10 years, respectively. And it only gets worse from there. Over the past three and five years, Intel stock generated negative annualized total returns.

So here's the bottom line. Have a look at the above chart and you'll see that if you invested $1,000 in Intel stock 20 years ago, today your stake would be worth less than $2,400 – or an annualized total return of 4.4%.

The same amount invested in the S&P 500 would theoretically be worth nearly $6,500 today – an annualized total return of more than 10%.

As illustrious and iconic as the Intel brand may be, Intel stock has been nothing but a sinkhole of opportunity cost for buy-and-hold investors for a very long time. 

More Stocks of the Past 20 Years

• If You'd Put $1,000 Into Disney Stock 20 Years Ago, Here's What You'd Have Today
• If You'd Put $1,000 Into IBM Stock 20 Years Ago, Here's What You'd Have Today
• If You'd Put $1,000 Into Amazon Stock 20 Years Ago, Here's What You'd Have Today