If you invest long enough, you'll likely run into a "I wish I had invested in that sooner" scenario. Nowadays, many investors find themselves having that thought about Nvidia (NVDA +2.92%) -- me included. And when you look at its performance over the past decade, it's very easy to see why.
In the past 10 years, Nvidia's stock is up an eye-popping 22,420%, meaning a $1,000 investment made a decade ago would be worth over $225,000. Talk about a return on investment.
Nvidia has been on the stock market since January 1999, but the bulk of its gains since then have come in the past few years, thanks to the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom. For a while, Nvidia's main business was supplying graphics cards for video games. However, the company realized that the same technology was useful for processing massive amounts of data, and it's now arguably the most important supplier of computing power.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
If you're interested in investing in Nvidia, it's not too late. However, I wouldn't expect its gains over the next decade to compare with those from this past decade. It still has long-term market-beating potential, but expecting the gains to replicate is asking a lot.
