Would Die Hard’s Hans Gruber have been able to sit on a beach and net 20%?
The greatest ever line about the stock market — from a movie — is in Die Hard. Alan Rickman’s character, Hans Gruber, teases at what he’ll do once he’s blown the roof off of Nakatomi Plaza and made away with the loot:
“When they touch down, we’ll blow up the roof, they’ll spend a month sifting through rubble, and by the time they work out what went wrong, we’ll be sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent.”
What a movie! It tops my list of movies to watch around Christmas.
But then that got me thinking. What if cocky old Hans and his questionable gang of accomplices (yes, the guy with the luscious golden locks was actually a ballet dancer) had made it off with the $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds. How in the hell did he plan on earning 20 percent?!
How he’d planned to get that sort of return on his money if his elaborate plan to blow-the-roof-then-make-it-off-in-an-ambulance-parked-in-the-underground-carpark plan had worked is beyond me. And sadly, we’ll never know. But he must have had one hell of an investment advisor.
Even in the late 1980s, twenty percent was a tall order. I mean, I’m sure he had his ways; methods equally as crooked as his terrorist heist. But what if Hans had burned his bridges?
What if his investment advisor had walked away after seeing the antics of Hans on the news and thinking “that’s too rich for my blood.” What if Hans had to continue investing in the stock market like the rest of us, as an everyday citizen with no insider information, using his alias — Bill Clay.
To keep things simple, let’s take a round $1000 and see if we can do to net 20 percent in the market in the late 80s. Naturally, Hans would have thrown a lot more of his share of the loot at the stock market… but the same interest return applies.
If he’d put $1,000 in Apple in 1980, you would have $228,113 today. But poor old Hans would be waiting quite a while for that bet to pay off. And it can’t be cheap being one of America’s most wanted men, if he had gotten away alive.
But if he didn’t have the foresight to bet on Apple – then wait a very long time before enjoying such great returns – what then?
Well, if he’d invested $1000 in the S&P 500 at the beginning of 1988, he would have about $36,500 by now, assuming he had reinvested the dividends. This is a return on investment of 3,544.84%, or 11.27% per year.
Adjusted for inflation thats a return of about 1,458.94% cumulatively, or 8.50% per year.
(Source: https://www.officialdata.org)
So hats off to ruthless old Hans Gruber who very nearly performed the heist of the century. But the real miracle, had he survived that fall to his death, would have been netting anywhere near 20 percent.
