What if you invested $1,000 in Walmart 20 years ago?

Think back to 2004 for a moment. The final episode of Friends aired, and many of us were listening to music on a brand-new iPod. Now, imagine that alongside everything else, you made one simple choice: you took $1,000—about what a new plasma TV cost back then—and decided on a long-term stock investment in a company you definitely knew: Walmart.

Today, that single decision would be worth over $6,500. This isn’t the result of a lucky guess or a complicated trading scheme. This impressive growth comes from a patient strategy and the simple mechanics of how wealth is built over time. The past performance of a Walmart stock investment shows the power of patience.

This growth isn’t just about the stock’s price increasing. The real story is how consistent cash payments (dividends) and a simple company maneuver (a stock split) worked together to supercharge your investment. Seeing how these elements create total shareholder return demystifies how investing can work for anyone.

First, How Your $1,000 Grew from a Simple Price Change

Let’s put that hypothetical $1,000 to work. Back in mid-2004, a single share of stock—a tiny piece of ownership in the company—cost about $54. With your thousand dollars, you could have purchased roughly 18.5 shares. Just like that, you’d be a part-owner of the world’s largest retailer. You wouldn’t get a key to the front door, but you would get a stake in its future success.

Over the next two decades, the first and most straightforward way your investment grew is through price appreciation. Think of it like a house or a collectible; as the company becomes more successful, the value of your piece of ownership can increase. As Walmart continued to grow and thrive globally, the price people were willing to pay for one of its shares went up, too.

That price jump alone is a great start, turning your initial investment into a healthy profit. But looking only at the stock’s price misses a huge part of the story—and a big chunk of your money. The first powerful, hidden engine of growth is something many new investors overlook.

The Secret Weapon: How Walmart Paid You Just for Being an Owner

Beyond the rising stock price, your ownership in Walmart came with another powerful benefit. Think of it like owning a small, successful rental property. The property increasing in value is great, but you also collect rent checks along the way. As a part-owner of Walmart, you get a similar treatment for sharing in the company’s success.

This direct sharing of profits is called a dividend. Because Walmart is a consistently profitable company, it has historically chosen to take a portion of its earnings and send it directly to its owners as a cash reward. For your investment, this would have meant a small but steady stream of cash appearing in your account multiple times per year, simply for holding onto your shares.

On its own, a single dividend payment from your 18.5 shares might not have seemed like much—perhaps just enough to buy lunch. But over two decades, those consistent payments add up to a significant amount of money. This isn’t profit from the stock’s price changing; it’s a completely separate return on your investment, like a bonus for your loyalty as an owner.

You could have simply taken that dividend cash and spent it. But using every small payment to automatically buy more Walmart stock is where the real growth begins.

The Real Magic: Turning Tiny Dividends into More Stock

That simple choice—using your dividend cash to automatically buy more shares—has a name: dividend reinvesting. Think of it as telling your investment platform, “Instead of giving me that cash, just use it to buy me another sliver of Walmart stock.” Most modern platforms let you set this up with a single click, creating a powerful, automated growth machine that works entirely on its own.

At first, this process barely makes a ripple. Buying a fraction of a share won’t make you rich overnight. But over many years, it creates a snowball effect that financial experts call compounding. Your original shares pay dividends, which buy new shares. Then, those new shares also start paying their own dividends, which buy even more shares. This cycle of your money making its own money is one of the most powerful forces in long-term investing, slowly but surely accelerating your wealth.

This process was transformative for your $1,000 in Walmart. Instead of just holding the 18.5 shares you initially bought, reinvesting every dividend steadily increased that number year after year. Each new fraction of a share became another tiny worker, earning more dividends for you. This self-fueling engine is how a small, patient investment can grow into something substantial.

The ‘Pizza Slice’ Trick: How a Stock Split Multiplied Your Shares

Beyond the steady growth from dividends, your investment got a sudden, dramatic boost from something called a stock split. The idea is best explained with pizza. Imagine each share you own is a big slice. A stock split is when the company cuts that one slice into several smaller ones. You still have the same total amount of pizza—your investment’s value doesn’t change at that moment—but you now hold more pieces. Companies do this to make a single share’s price lower and more inviting for new investors.

This is exactly what happened with WMT stock in early 2024, one of the most important Walmart stock splits in the last 20 years. The company performed a 3-for-1 split. For every single share an investor held, they suddenly had three the next day. If you had built up your stake to 50 shares, you would have woken up to find 150 shares in your account. While the price of each new share was one-third of the original, the total value of your holdings remained exactly the same.

Having three times the shares meant you started earning three times the dividends going forward. This pours gasoline on the fire of compounding, allowing you to reinvest more money and grow your ownership even faster. It’s the final powerful multiplier that helps answer the question of how much would WMT stock be worth today.

Putting It All Together: Your $1,000 Is Now Worth Over $6,500

The real magic happens when you combine all three growth drivers: the stock’s price going up, the cash dividends you received, and the stock split that multiplied your shares. This combined power is what investors call Total Return, and it’s the only number that truly shows you the full story of your investment’s performance.

By adding up those three growth engines, your original $1,000 invested in Walmart 20 years ago would have grown to over $6,500 today. Here’s a quick recap of how it happened:

• Your initial shares grew in value as the company succeeded.
• You received and reinvested dividends for two decades.
• The 2024 stock split then multiplied your total number of shares.

What does that final amount really mean? It’s the difference between simply owning a stock and truly being an owner who participates in its growth. That $6,500 is enough for an amazing family vacation or a major home renovation project—all from an initial investment the price of a fancy TV two decades ago. Calculating the total return on WMT stock reveals a much richer reward than the daily stock price ever could.

Was Walmart a Better Investment Than Amazon or the Entire Market?

That jump from $1,000 to over $6,500 is impressive, but it’s natural to wonder: was it the best choice? To gain perspective, it helps to compare Walmart’s journey to two other possibilities: a high-flying growth stock like Amazon and the overall stock market average.

When comparing Walmart vs Amazon stock growth over time, you see two completely different strategies. Amazon acted as a pure “growth” stock, pouring every penny of profit back into expanding its business, which created explosive returns for its early investors. Walmart, by contrast, balanced its growth with sharing profits through dividends, offering a steadier and more predictable journey. It was the reliable workhorse, not the unproven racehorse.

So what about “the market” itself? Investors often use the S&P 500—an average of 500 large U.S. companies—as a measuring stick. The Walmart stock vs S&P 500 performance over this period shows that the overall market average actually grew a bit more. This tells us that while Walmart was a solid and safe investment, it didn’t quite beat the average. So, was Walmart a good long-term investment? Absolutely. But it wasn’t the only story of success.

The Real Takeaway: What This Story Means for Your Financial Future

A stock’s 20-year journey is no longer an unsolvable mystery. You’ve seen the real engines behind the long-term benefits of investing: simple ideas like a company sharing its profits and the quiet magic of compounding returns on stock investments. It isn’t about risky bets or complex formulas, but about patience.

This story isn’t a stock tip, but a new lens for your financial future. It’s proof that you don’t need to be an expert to grasp the powerful forces that build wealth. The next time you hear about the market, you’ll feel less intimidated because you understand the patient strategy at work. That confidence is the true first step in learning how to start investing.