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.
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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.
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Anders Bylund has positions in Netflix and Walmart. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
