MP Materials (MP 4.02%) is a California-based rare earth miner whose stock has exploded this year. At one point, enthusiasm for MP's magnet business was so high the stock had grown over 500% on the year. These days, you're more likely to see a gain above 250% or so, which is still considerable for a mining company that isn't profitable.
When you see a stock grow fivefold on the year, it's easy to assume the runway for future gains has been narrowed. And while that might be true for the near term, when we zoom out and look at its last five years, we'll see that the trajectory looks decent but not as drastic.
NYSE: MP
Key Data Points
How much would $100 in MP be worth today?
Five years ago, MP's share price was about $21 a pop. With $100, you would have bought about 4.75 shares. At today's price (about $60), those same shares would be worth about $285, reflecting a 186% gain.
Over that same period, if you'd invested in an S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (ETF), such as the iShares Core, your $100 would have grown about 87% to leave you with about $187 today.
Image source: MP Materials.
It's worth pointing out that before 2025, that same investment in MP Materials would have likely been in the red. From about late 2023 to late January 2025, MP stock was trending downward. It was only when trade tensions heated up between China and the U.S. did MP Materials become strategically significant as one of the only scaled rare earth miners in the U.S.
That unique value proposition has propelled MP stock to the heights it's reached this year. The question, then, becomes -- can it prove to be the rare earth miner that investors, including the Pentagon, expect it to be? If it does, today's share price five years from now could look cheap in retrospect.
