4 Stocks That Turned $1,000 Into $1 Million
This is real. It is actually possible to make a million dollars in the stock market with just a $1,000 investment.
However, these big gains are never quick. The $1,000,000 payouts are also quite rare. Few investments can combine the multi-decade longevity and game-changing business success that's required to meet that lofty goal.
Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »
I found four interesting examples of early $1,000 investments blooming into million-dollar wealth over time. Others may exist, especially if you look at very long time periods. I'm not necessarily recommending all of these stocks, because their lucrative history doesn't guarantee market-beating returns in the future.
On that note, none of these names will need much of an introduction. Here are four stocks that turned $1,000 into a cool million, with any dividends along the way reinvested in more of the same stock. I'll show you the latest month you had to invest $1,000 in each stock in order to generate a $1,000,000 total return by the end of April, 2025.
WMT Total Return Price data by YCharts
Walmart: August 1982
Retail empire Walmart (NYSE: WMT) is a classic example of slow and steady winning the race. The first store opened its doors in 1962. The first billion-dollar annual sales were seen in the 1980s, amid a nationwide expansion of the store network. Last year's total sales clocked in at $681 billion, generating $12.7 billion of free cash flows.
As you can see in the chart above, you'd have a million dollars in the bank if you started a $1,000 Walmart investment in the summer of 1982. There were some slow periods, like the mid-1990s and the first few years of the new millennium, but Walmart's intermittent growth spurts got the job done. These days, the stock is soaring again on Walmart's newfound success in e-commerce sales.
MSFT Total Return Price data by YCharts
Microsoft: January 1990
A $1,000 stake in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) stock would have taken about 35 years to make you a millionaire. The company launched the first commercially successful version of Windows later that year, with a clickable graphical user interface and multimedia support. The internet was quietly emerging from a pure research stage, though the first user-friendly Web browser was still two years away.
Microsoft would go on to soar in stages, driven by the widespread use of home computers, the dot-com boom, and the more recent cloud-based computing and artificial intelligence (AI) explosions.
AAPL Total Return Price data by YCharts
Apple: October 2002
The same secular trends that boosted Microsoft also helped Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL). However, the time frame for this $1,000 to $1,000,000 surge is much shorter, starting with the iMacs and iPods of the early 2000s.
This company also conquered the mobile computing market with iPhones and iPads. Apple Stores have set the standard for running a hyper-efficient luxury retail store, and Cupertino keeps delivering best-selling smartphone designs every year.
NFLX Total Return Price data by YCharts
Netflix: March 2003
That brings me to the quickest of these four million-dollar jumps. Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) rewrote the rulebook for video rentals with its red DVD mailers, but was quick to abandon that success story in favor of digital video-streaming services. Netflix's business soared in the coronavirus lockdown period, but the artificial acceleration disappeared when people got back to entertainment options outside their homes. An agile transition to ad-supported subscriptions later, Netflix got back on track and the stock is exploring all-time highs again.
The million-dollar lesson: Patience pays off
There you have it. $1,000 really can turn into $1,000,000 in the stock market, but even the swiftest surge here took more than two decades. On the other hand, Walmart outperformed the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) market index by a fairly slim margin, and that was still good enough to deliver a thousand-fold return in 38 years.
So there are many paths to life-changing stock returns, but they all have one thing in common: Unshakable patience over several decades. The real trick is to find stocks that can stick around and deliver consistent gains over a very long period.
Should you invest $1,000 in Netflix right now?
Before you buy stock in Netflix, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Netflix wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $611,271!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $684,068!*
Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is889% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to162%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of April 28, 2025
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Globe and Mail
36 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Hims & Hers Stock Is Soaring Again. But Should You Buy the Stock?
Many companies have failed to disrupt the complicated U.S. healthcare market. Hims & Hers (NYSE: HIMS) may finally be succeeding in cracking the code. The online telehealth platform focuses on circumventing the insurance market; its business of selling affordable medications directly to individuals is growing like a weed, and expects to generate $6.5 billion in revenue by 2030. It has had a tumultuous start to 2025, as Hims & Hers waged a battle to sell new weight loss medications on its online marketplace. Now, with momentum back on its side, the stock is up 118% year to date and 446% in the last five years. Let's take a deeper look at this company, and see whether you might want to buy Hims & Hers stock for your portfolio now. Disrupting the healthcare market Hims & Hers' model is simple. It has two separate web platforms -- Hims for men and Hers for women -- that sell medications and deliver to customers' front doors. It began with sexual health, but has moved into dermatology, hair loss, mental health, and now weight loss medications. A key to its success has been avoiding the insurance market with products that don't break the bank. Customers loathe dealing with health insurers in the United States, and sometimes would rather not use insurance at all. Plus, some of these products aren't covered by insurance. This strategy has helped the company close in on over $2 billion in projected revenue in 2025. To keep up this impressive growth, Hims & Hers wants to offer weight loss medications, which have been a blockbuster set of drugs for the pharmaceutical market. For a while the popularity of these drugs, such as Novo Nordisk 's Wegovy, left them in short supply; that allowed third parties such as Hims & Hers to produce them as a compounding pharmacy and sell them at much cheaper prices. This ended up generating $200 million of Hims & Hers' $1.4 billion in 2024 revenue. But with the shortage of Wegovy over and the compounding pharmacy exception ended, the company's weight-loss business was at a major turning point. Luckily, at the end of April Hims & Hers announced a partnership with Novo Nordisk that seems to resolve this issue: It gives Hims & Hers the ability to sell Wegovy directly on its platform. Hims & Hers is not an exclusive supplier of the drug -- or any drugs on its marketplaces, to be fair -- but it hopes to use its subscription business model, marketing expertise, and simplified user proposition to drive sales for Novo Nordisk in the huge obesity-care market. Going abroad and personalization Besides weight loss drugs, Hims & Hers has more ambitions to reach its goal of $6.5 billion in revenue by 2030. Just recently, the company announced its intent to acquire European competitor Zava so it could expand its telehealth service to Europe. The acquisition will add a platform with 1.3 million active customers in the U.K., Germany, France, and Ireland. It makes sense that Hims & Hers can supercharge growth for the platform with its plethora of medications offered to customers, keen marketing skills, and subscription-based selling model. Over the long run, Hims & Hers aims to make healthcare for its customers more personalized. This includes unique drug combinations, its own outsourcing facility, and at-home testing capabilities. Details remain sparse, but the vision is clear: disrupting more and more of the trillions of dollars spent on healthcare by building a business that people actually enjoy interacting with. This is why 2.4 million active customers use Hims & Hers today. HIMS Gross Profit Margin data by YCharts. Should you buy Hims & Hers stock? A revenue goal of $6.5 billion seems well within reach by 2030. Hims & Hers is only at 2.4 million active customers, and there are tens of millions of people in the United States alone who could start using or switch to one of its telehealth platforms. Add on the Zava acquisition in Europe, and the runway for growth gets even larger. The company has an impressive gross profit margin of 77%, which should lead to high levels of profitability at scale. On $6.5 billion in future revenue, it could very well post a net profit margin of over 20%, and achieve $1.5 billion in bottom-line profits and free cash flow. A 20% profit margin is easily achievable because of its high gross margins and the fact it currently spends 40% of revenue on marketing today, a figure that has come down over time and should come down even more as Hims & Hers keeps scaling. However, Hims & Hers has played fast and loose with laws and regulations in the past. It sold weight loss drugs when the legality of doing so was unclear, and although that dispute seems to have been resolved, management could easily start playing with fire again and burn its reputation as a trusted provider of medications. Otherwise, this looks like a fantastic growth stock that just doubled its addressable market with the Zava acquisition. Today, Hims & Hers has a market cap of $12.3 billion. You might think it's overvalued because of the stock's recent run-up in price, but the numbers show that patient investors could be rewarded by holding for the long term. A $12.3 billion market cap is only around 8 times my 2030 earnings estimate of $1.5 billion, which would be a dirt cheap price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio for a fast-growing company compared to the current market cap. Most likely, the stock will be valued at a higher multiple than 8, meaning that the stock will be higher in five years. It doesn't come without risks, but if you're a growth investor, you might love Hims & Hers stock for its long-term potential. Should you invest $1,000 in Hims & Hers Health right now? Before you buy stock in Hims & Hers Health, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Hims & Hers Health wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $868,615!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to173%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Better Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock: CoreWeave vs. Nvidia
There will prove to be many winners as artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure continues to grow and AI end-uses expand. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been the Wall Street darling surrounding everything AI for the past two years. CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) has been getting the love most recently, though. Shares of the AI hyperscaler providing cloud services have soared about 185% in just the past month as of this writing. Nvidia stock has increased 24% in that time. CoreWeave just went public in late March, and the shares have jumped about 270% since that initial public offering (IPO). Investors may wonder if Nvidia's shine is fading, and it's time to buy CoreWeave instead. I'd argue that is flawed thinking, however. The growth isn't over for Nvidia Investors may be taking a breather after the early exponential gains in Nvidia stock. Growth in the business itself has also slowed, though that was inevitable. Sales of its advanced chips in the data center segment had been growing like a weed. Revenue in that segment has been increasing in each consecutive quarter for the last two years. In the most recent fiscal quarter, that growth rate slowed to 10%, though, as seen below. Despite that trend, it's clear AI demand hasn't yet peaked. Remember, these are still sequential quarterly increases in data center sales. For perspective, that fiscal first-quarter revenue was a 73% jump compared to the prior year period. Management also guided investors to expect further revenue growth in the current quarter. So, while an unsustainable growth rate slows, the company is still solidly in growth mode. Nvidia is more ubiquitous than you might think That's because it's not just Nvidia's advanced GPU and CPU chips driving sales and expanding AI infrastructure. Its AI ecosystem includes interconnect technologies, the CUDA (compute unified device architecture) software platform, and artificial intelligence processors that are part of many different types of architectures. CEO Jensen Huang recently touted Nintendo 's new Switch 2 gaming console, for example. The unit includes Nvidia's AI processors that Huang claims "sharpen, animate, and enhance gameplay in real time." Nvidia has a broad array of customers. As AI factories and data centers are built, it will continue to be a major supplier and one that investors should benefit from owning. Nvidia also invests in the AI sector. It makes sense to look at where the AI leader itself sees future gains. Nvidia thinks CoreWeave is a good investment One of the AI companies in which Nvidia holds a stake is CoreWeave. Nvidia should know CoreWeave well, too, as an important customer. CoreWeave leases data center space to companies needing the scalable, on-demand compute power it has control of from the 250,000 Nvidia chips it has purchased. It's a desirable option for enterprises that require significant computational power to process large amounts of data efficiently. There appears to be plenty of demand. But there is plenty of risk for investors, too. It just announced a new lease agreement to further increase capacity. Applied Digital, a builder and operator of purpose-built data centers, has agreed to deliver CoreWeave 250 megawatts (MW) of power load on a 15-year term lease at its recently built North Dakota data center campus. CoreWeave has the option to expand the load by an additional 150 MW in the future. Demand is quickly driving growth for CoreWeave. That's led investors to jump in and drive the stock higher in recent months. Valuation is just one major risk with CoreWeave. Customer concentration is another. Last year, Microsoft accounted for nearly two-thirds of revenue. CoreWeave also disclosed that 77% of 2024 revenue came from just its top two customers. CoreWeave is also spending massive amounts of capital to grow AI cloud capacity. It had about $5.4 billion of liquidity available as of March 31 and raised another $2 billion from a late May debt offering. That's approximately its level of capital expenditure in just the first quarter alone, though. CoreWeave has the risk, Nvidia has the profits That spending may pay off. But there are risks there as well. Customers could develop their own AI infrastructure or could redesign systems that don't require its services. CoreWeave stock also trades at a high valuation after the stock has soared. It recently had a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of about 30. That could be cut in half this year with its strong sales growth, but it isn't earning any money yet. At the same time, Nvidia sports a price-to- earnings (P/E) ratio of about 30 based on this year's expected profits. Remember, too, that as CoreWeave grows, so do Nvidia's profits. Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said that its leased North Dakota data center campus will be full of Nvidia Blackwell class servers. I think the risk profile, financial picture, and massive potential for Nvidia make it the better AI stock to buy now. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $868,615!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to173%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025
Globe and Mail
2 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Can OpenAI really go the way of Apple and capture lightning in a bottle?
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail. After OpenAI's series of embarrassing stumbles – including disruptive outages, pesky glitches in its ChatGTP platform, and the bizarre ousting and rehiring of its chief executive officer in a matter of days – the popular artificial-intelligence platform finally got one right. So right, in fact, that the company has manoeuvred itself into a position to put some blue water between itself and deep-pocketed rivals in the development of AI devices, the way Apple did with rivals in the computer and mobile phone world. The Apple comparison is not coincidental. Late last month, OpenAI said it planned to acquire an AI device company called io in an all-equity deal valued at about US$6.4-billion. Embedded in the purchase is a secret weapon that goes well beyond the technology: the design legend and io co-founder Jony Ive. OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5B deal Mr. Ive is not just another smart techie. He is the design genius responsible for creating Apple's most iconic products, including the iPod, iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. He also helped design Apple's ultra-modern California headquarters. It was Mr. Ive's eye for combining elegant simplicity and functionality that set Apple's products apart from all others, first in the world of PCs and then in handheld devices. Even Apple's packaging reflects Mr. Ives's commitment to reinforcing the brand's sleek beauty in every way it touches customers. So influential was Mr. Ive that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said he considered him to be his 'spiritual partner' who saw things the same way he did. Mr. Ive was among Mr. Jobs's first hires when he returned to Apple in 1997 after being fired from the company more than a decade earlier. Mr. Ive had a direct and unfettered reporting relationship with Mr. Jobs. Few would question Mr. Ive's enormous influence on the devices we all use every day. In a post about the io acquisition on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that Mr. Ive is 'the greatest designer in the world.' OpenAI needs a win. The acquisition of Mr. Ive and io is a crucial strategic play for OpenAI to stay ahead in the generative AI race, where competitors including Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI are making significant investments and quickly pushing new products to market. The showdown in AI devices is seen as the next big inflection point for the sector that may drive consolidation and some flame-outs – fates OpenAI seems determined to avoid. The purchase of io – OpenAI already owns about 23 per cent of the company – is the latest in a recent shopping spree that has seen OpenAI shore up its hardware assets. Just a few weeks ago, it agreed to buy AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf for US$3-billion. OpenAI also acquired analytics database company Rockset last year. OpenAI has also hired the former head of Meta's Orion augmented reality glasses initiative to lead its robotics and consumer hardware efforts. OpenAI CFO says new structure opens door for potential IPO Despite the asset and talent accumulation, OpenAI has some hurdles to clear with its current offerings, as well some reputation issues that continue to dog its credibility. The company has been plagued by high error rates in its application programming interface (API) and performance problems in ChatGTP. Users have reported a wide range of gremlins, including slow response times, trouble mining information from source documents, contextual problems and generic responses to queries. But perhaps OpenAI's biggest black eye came in November, 2023, when its board ousted Mr. Altman as CEO because of concerns about his leadership capabilities and lack of transparency in his communications with directors. Then, just a few days later, after employees protested the firing and threatened a mass walk-out, Mr. Altman was reinstated as CEO. An independent investigation concluded that the board's initial concerns about Mr. Altman did not rise to the threshold for termination. But the damage was done. The chaos in the governance structure dealt a blow to OpenAI's reputation at a time in its young life when it was breaking new ground and trying to establish credibility in the fast-emerging AI space. If history is any guide, Mr. Ive's eye for the kind of elegant, simple and unique device designs that separated Apple from the pack will give OpenAI an advantage over its bigger rivals. The big questions are: Can he capture lightning in a bottle again, the way he did at Apple, and will he be given the latitude to pursue the unique creative path that has made him a tech legend? Based on OpenAI's past governance bungling, Mr. Altman's biggest job is to keep the board out of Mr. Ive's hair and let him work his magic. If they can manage that, oh, the places they'll go.
