On March 27, 2000, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) closed at $117.75. That was the top. The Nasdaq-100 index the fund tracks peaked that day, and the fund didn’t close above that price again for more than 16 years.
And yet the worst-timed purchase in the fund’s 27-year history still worked out fine. A $10,000 investment at that closing peak, with dividends reinvested, is worth about $72,000 today (about 7.2 times the original stake).
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That’s the comforting half of the story, and I think it’s the half that is remembered. The other half is what it cost to collect. With the fund again trading close to its highs as of this writing, that cost is worth understanding in full.
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An 83% loss, then a 15-year wait
The Nasdaq-100’s top came late in the bubble: its closing high on March 27 arrived more than two weeks after the broader Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX:^IXIC) had already peaked on March 10, 2000.
From there, the fund fell in stages for about two and a half years. It bottomed on Oct. 9, 2002, closing at $20.06 — an 83% decline from the peak. At the low, the $10,000 stake was worth about $1,700.
The climb back took much longer than the drop.
With dividends reinvested, the investment first returned to even in February 2015, nearly 15 years after the purchase. And even that didn’t last. The fund slipped back below the starting value repeatedly over the following 16 months before moving above it for good in mid-2016.
However, the share price itself took longer still. The fund didn’t close above $117.75 again until September 2016. Reinvested dividends, small as they were, brought the recovery forward by about a year and a half.
The fund recovered before its biggest stocks did
What eventually rescued the March 2000 buyer was not the era’s leadership coming back.
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) closed at $80.06 the same day the index peaked, and it didn’t close above that price again until December 2025 — more than 25 years later. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) set its 2000 closing high that August, and the level stood until this past April. Microsoft recovered faster, and it still took until 2016.
Put another way, the fund’s share price was back above its previous peak almost a decade before Cisco and Intel got back to theirs.
