Back in 2015, for £50 you could have bought a family platter at Nando’s, approximately 18 coffees, or 153 shares of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock.
Now, unless you really, really value coffee or a nice meal, you would have probably been significantly better off buying shares in the US tech giant.
Let me show you how.
Calculating the return
I’ve adjusted for stock splits, so bearing this in mind, Nvidia stock has increased from $0.50 at the start of 2015 to $197.92 now, a whopping 39,481% rise.
Taking into account the USD to GBP exchange rate on 2 January 2015 of 0.6499, as mentioned above, an investor could have bought 153 Nvidia shares.
Now, each of those shares is worth almost $200 today and in total, they should be worth $30,281.76! Using the most recent exchange rate of 0.734, that position would be worth £22,226.81.
Essentially, spending £50 on the company’s stock would have made investors over £22k in just over 11 years.
Some of this return would have been because the dollar strengthened against the pound. But the vast majority of it is because of compounding. This shows how powerful picking high-quality stocks can be for investors.
Even a meagre £50 can make a whole load of difference. Every additional pound an investor put in would have made approximately £444 extra.
Can Nvidia do it again?
While I don’t think the US tech giant will be able to deliver the same level of returns as before, I still believe it’s capable of generating excellent returns for investors.
There are risks for the firm, especially as competition in the AI space heats up. Some of its customers (who are also its rivals) are trying to build their own AI chips, which are much more cost-effective. For example, Alphabet’s tensor processing units.
However, there are also many catalysts that can propel the firm’s share price.
This is because it has huge momentum behind it. Nvidia has increased its revenue from $27bn in FY23 to $216bn in FY26.
Furthermore, analysts are estimating that its revenue can rise by a further 71.7% in FY27, to hit $371bn. They then anticipate the company to grow by a further 30.6% in FY28 to reach $484bn in revenue.
This is monstrous growth, which is particularly impressive given how large the company is already.
The valuation is attractive too
For some, a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 40.5 is too high. But for a company that’s growing as fast as Nvidia, I think it’s justified.
In fact, when you consider that the forward P/E is only 24.5, I think its valuation can even be considered cheap.
The market for AI is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30.6% from 2026 to 2033. Given that Nvidia’s graphics processing units are expected to power this, I expect the company to grow at a similar rate.
Therefore, I think even after its monumental rise, investors could consider buying some of its shares for potentially strong future returns.
