The 5 Best S&P 500 Stocks of the Last 10 Years

• Investment in Nvidia, a dominant player in the AI chip sector, has skyrocketed from $1,000 to an astonishing $312,610 over the past decade.

• In comparison, a $1,000 investment in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) would have grown to $93,250 during the same timeframe.

• Shares of Arista Networks, a prominent cloud networking firm, have turned a $1,000 investment into $35,890 over the last decade.

• Discover 10 stocks we see as superior to Nvidia ›

While short-term stock fluctuations often dominate financial headlines, they often represent mere noise. Savvy long-term investors should prioritize evaluating a stock’s historical performance and its forward-looking growth opportunities when making investment decisions.

The sustained performance of a company’s stock, especially in the dynamic tech sector, usually indicates a capable management team and a robust business strategy that is agile enough to adapt to market changes.

Below, we highlight the five top-performing stocks on the S&P 500 index over the past decade, as of Friday, September 26. For growth investors, these stocks, particularly Nvidia, deserve a closer look.

The stocks listed below are ranked by their 10-year performance.

Source of data includes Yahoo! Finance, Finviz, and YCharts. P/E indicates price-to-earnings ratio. EPS refers to earnings per share. YTD stands for year to date. Data is current as of September 26, 2025.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are regarded as the benchmark in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) model training and application deployment. This has led to exponential revenue and earnings growth for Nvidia, particularly in the wake of the generative AI boom that took off around three years ago, greatly diversifying AI’s potential applications.

In its most recent fiscal second quarter, Nvidia reported an impressive 56% year-on-year revenue jump to $46.7 billion, largely driven by a staggering 56% increase in AI-driven data center revenue, which reached $41.1 billion, accounting for 88% of total revenue. Other segments, including gaming and professional visualization, enjoyed remarkable growth as well, with increases of 49%, 32%, and 69% respectively.