Don't want to trade it yourself?
Our desk runs DEX portfolios on profit share.
January 2015. The AI revolution is still six years away. Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone 6 is the hottest consumer device on the planet. NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is a gaming chip company trading at split-adjusted prices below $1.
And Bitcoin is struggling to hold above $280 after two brutal bearish years.
Nobody in early 2015 would have ranked these three assets the way the data ranks them today.
Here is what $1,000 in each looks like on Aug. 19, 2026.
NVIDIA: The winner nobody saw coming
The NVIDIA stock was trading at approximately $0.54 on a split-adjusted basis in July 2015, a price that reflected a company still best known for gaming graphics cards, with no particular claim on the future of AI. A $1,000 investment bought roughly 1,852 shares back then.
The stock is trading at approximately $225 today, giving that position a current value of approximately $416,700. A return of 41,570% in eleven years.
The move from gaming chip supplier to the backbone of global AI infrastructure is the single most valuable business transformation of the past decade. Nothing about NVIDIA in 2015 suggested it was building toward a $5 trillion dollar market cap.
The data centers, the AI training clusters, the CUDA software ecosystem, none of it was visible from the outside in a way that made this a consensus bet.
Popular on TheStreet Roundtable:
-
Top economists warn of wealth inequality in U.S. surpassing Gilded Age
-
Wall Street financier who rightly predicted the Bitcoin crash has a new warning
-
Why is CZ burning so many tokens? The reason may surprise you
Bitcoin: The return that required everything
Bitcoin was trading near $280 in July 2015, down 76% from its 2013 all-time high (ATH) of $1,163. The cryptocurrency was dismissed back then, and carrying the reputational weight of the Mt. Gox collapse.
A $1,000 investment bought approximately 3.57 BTC. At today’s price of $68,000, that position is worth roughly $242,760. A return of 24,186%.
The return required holding through an 84% crash in 2018, a 77% collapse in 2022, the FTX bankruptcy, and the current 49% drawdownfrom the $126,000 ATH reached in October 2025.
Every single one of those moments felt like the end.
Apple: The safe bet that still delivered
The Apple stock was trading at approximately $27.85 on a split-adjusted basis in January 2015. It was the world’s most valuable company back then.
A $1,000 investment bought roughly 35.9 shares. The Apple stock is trading near $309 today, making that position worth approximately $11,093. A return of just over 1,009%.
Source: finance.yahoo.com