Retiring as a millionaire has been the dream of many people for years. In the fanciful world of ‘what if’ chats over a pint, it didn’t matter how you did it, the endgame is what mattered, not the journey. Buying that Ferrari, taking luxurious cruises around the Caribbean, or owning that stately pile in the country was the dream of millions of us, and we played the pools or bought National Lottery tickets in the vague hope that it could be us.

Investment is different, lodged largely in the real world where discipline, not daydreaming, is far more important to meeting your goals. Yet astonishing returns are possible, with preparation, method and, above all, plenty of time.

If you’d had the foresight to put £5,000 into what in the early 1980s was a fairly obscure mining company trading for pennies then you could have an investment worth nearly £50 million today.

It has become commonplace to read stories of early investors, even ordinary folk, in the big disruptors of recent decades, like Apple (AAPL:NASDAQ), Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ) and Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ), becoming very wealthy by mainstream standards.

In just the past 10 years these three stocks have returned an average 25%, 23% and 53% a year respectively. Put another way, for every £1,000 invested in these three companies a decade ago, you would have approximately £9,300, £7,900 and more than £70,000.

BILL GATES, THE MILLIONAIRE MAKER

There are other even more eye-popping stories. Take Microsoft (MSFT:NASDAQ), for example. As early as the mid-1970s, founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen knew that computers were soon to transform the world, a time when for most people, a top-loader video recorder or Atari games console would soon represent the very bleeding edge of consumer technology.

Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, and over the next decade they developed software so rapidly and life-changing, that investors wanted in. The Seattle-based firm went public in 1986 at a then $777 million valuation and, according to legend, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire within a year.

But it would be wrong to presume that such returns are restricted to privileged institutions and insiders. The explosion of personal computers for all has been so successful, and the company has grown so valuable that thousands of ordinary investors might today be millionaires.

According to Nasdaq, had you invested $1,000 in Microsoft at its IPO, you would have acquired 47 shares at $21 per share. Adjusting for nine stock splits over the decades (designed to keep the stock within reach of people like you and me), you’d have 13,536 shares today with a cost basis of $0.0729 per share.

Given that Microsoft now trades at $264.60, Shares’ back of notebook calculations implies a share price return of 362,862%.

In dollar terms, that $1,000 investment in 1986 would be worth almost $3.63 million today.

It gets better too, because Microsoft has paid dividends for two decades now, so assuming you’d taken that cash distribution, but never sold a single share along the way, you’d have also received an estimated $341,513 in income, says Nasdaq.

OK, you’ve probably read similar stories about other big US companies and their earth-shattering stock market returns. But it is a fallacy to think that investors have needed to embrace overseas companies to have struck stock market gold in this way.

As Shares’ findings show, holding stakes in businesses such as Greggs (GRG), Games Workshop (GAW), Berkeley (BKG) and Jet2 (JET2:AIM) might well have made you a millionaire, even from a relatively modest investment of £5,000, had you held them since they floated and reinvested dividends.

One stock, mining firm Antofagasta (ANTO), would have made you a fortune in the tens of millions, £48.15 million to be precise. It was penny stock in 1982 and has paid some generous dividends along the way.

UK-based manufacturers, like BAE Systems (BA.), Renishaw (RSW) and Victrex (VCT), have also delivered the kind of returns needed to make someone rich. So much for the ‘Britain doesn’t make anything anymore’ brigade.

80s MARKET STARS WHICH MADE YOU RICH

Shares’ search was simple; we looked for companies worth more than £1 billion today with the kind of long-term returns record that would have given investors a decent run at becoming a millionaire from a single stock. This is not meant to be a complete list, and there are all sorts of variables to factor in, but a consistent theme is time… a great friend to the sensible investor.

Let’s look a few examples, and where better to start than Tyneside baker-turned-food on the go provider Greggs. One of Britain’s best-loved brands, modern-day Greggs has more than 2,200 outlets nationwide, selling everything from fresh sandwiches and savouries to affordable coffees, breakfasts, confectionery and pizza slices. Today’s Greggs also retails healthier options including gluten-free, vegan-friendly and lower calorie products including the now-iconic vegan sausage roll.

In the four decades since it joined the stock market it has weathered multiple recessions, Black Wednesday (when the UK fell out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, or ERM), long-term governments of both red and blue hue, the dot com boom and bust, the global financial crisis, massive changes to how we all live and work and a worldwide pandemic.

Wags might say a tin hat would be more emblematic of its back story than its iconic sausage roll.

Yet, here it still stands, and what a fantastic investment it has been along that seemingly rocky road. If you’d invested £5,000 at the time of the stock market listing in 1984, that outlay would have grown into nearly £3.17 million if you’d reinvested all dividends, according to Refinitiv data, demonstrating the almighty power of compounding.

Yet even if you had needed the income to live on, the share price growth alone over that period has been incredible, increasing more than 20-fold.

Sure, it faces challenges, as Shares explained in detail late last year, yet the business is, arguably, stronger than it has ever been.

FLYING HIGH

Let’s look at another popular business with UK consumers, and increasingly again, with investors… Jet2. From freight airline (it made much of its money early on flying flowers just-in-time to retailers) to holidays and cheap European flights operator, the old Dart Group, as it was called previously, has proved an (almost) unrelenting success with consumers and investors.

Focusing on the latter, shareholders from day one on the stock market have enjoyed an astonishing 30,864% total return, says Refinitiv. Put that another way, a £5,000 investment back then would today valued at more than £1.54 million.

True, Jet2 has experienced several false dawns in its Covid recovery, yet the brand has earned numerous plaudits from the public for the way it put customers first during the Covid-19 pandemic, something not all travel companies can necessarily say. That’s important from an investment point of view going forward, but so too has been management’s exceptional handling of company finances.

With the stock up 33% so far in 2023, investors appear to see that recovery continuing through the rest of this year and beyond as it takes market share from rivals for whom public opinion is, shall we say, less positive, and others that have not survived at all.

THE HALF A MILLION POUND PIZZA AND OTHER 90S STARS

Now let’s look at the returns of Domino’s Pizza (DOM), which has been on the stock market the fewest number of years of any of our selected stocks, having joined just before the millennium in November 1999.

While managing enormous change over the years as consumers embraced home delivered dinners, Domino’s has adapted to and, in some cases led, these shifts since becoming the master UK and Ireland franchise for its US-listed parent.

The shares would not have made you a millionaire from a £5,000 original investment, though that capital stake would today be worth £547,310, a mightily impressive 10,946% total return. To have made a million your untouched day one investment would have had to be at least £9,136.

What we hope readers will take away from this exercise in hindsight is the power of time to help build wealth. As the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett says, ‘only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.’

Fundsmith Equity’s (B41YBW7) Terry Smith runs his hugely popular fund along similar lines, and tells investors to ‘buy good companies, don’t overpay, then do nothing.’ It’s an investment ethos that has been sorely tested over the past 15-months. It is worth remembering that nothing stays the same for ever, the world turns, and things change, sometimes for the better.

‘Successful investing takes time, discipline, and patience,’ says Buffett. ‘No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.’

DISCLAIMER: The author of this article (Steven Frazer) owns shares in Fundsmith Equity.

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