A $21,000 bet on SanDisk one year ago would be worth more than a million dollars today. Let that sink in.
SanDisk and Western Digital went their separate ways in February 2025. Since then, the stock has returned roughly 41 times your money, as AI-mania sent NAND flash memory demand through the roof.
And SanDisk (SNDK) isn’t the only stock where you could have turned a normal-sized portfolio into generational wealth over the last few years. It’s just the most recent.
SanDisk and the other names on this list share one thing: the entry came at a moment of market panic. Big returns tend to come from buying when everyone else is selling. Since the start of 2022, two such moments are worth studying: the 2022 bear market that bottomed in October and dragged through December, and the tariff-driven selloff of April 2025, which pushed the S&P 500 down 19% from its February peak in a matter of weeks. Below are stocks where a $10,000 to $50,000 gamble at their bottoms is now worth roughly a million dollars.
Finder.com looked at the publicly traded stocks that delivered the biggest returns since the 2022 bottom, the entry size needed to produce a seven-figure outcome, and what each company actually did to get there. Returns are based on Yahoo Finance closing prices for May 13, 2026.
One caveat upfront: each name on this list had its own bottom on a different date. No single investor caught all four. The point isn’t to dwell on what you missed, it’s to look at what these moments had in common and what the names that didn’t bounce got wrong.
SanDisk separated from Western Digital on February 24, 2025 and started trading independently on the Nasdaq. The stock closed near $30 a year ago and now sits near $1,447. A $1,000 investment last April at SNDK’s bottom is worth about $49,000 now. A $21,000 stake is worth about $1,026,000. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 would have grown to roughly $1,410.
The timing wasn’t an accident. SanDisk’s first months of independent trading coincided with the broad tariff selloff that hit US equities in late March and early April 2025. The stock was a newly-public, unproven story trading into a market panic. That combination gave the AI infrastructure thesis time to build before the price caught up.
The fundamentals back it up. AI infrastructure spending broke the NAND flash supply-demand balance, and SanDisk’s recent quarters have shown explosive revenue growth, gross margin expansion and a long list of multi-year supply contracts with hyperscaler customers. The stock joined the Nasdaq-100 in April 2026, replacing Atlassian.
The caveat: SanDisk now trades at valuations that would have looked absurd a year ago. Whatever the next 12 months hold, it’s unlikely they’ll look like the last 12.
Carvana (CVNA) closed at $3.70 on December 27, 2022 or adjusted $0.74 following the company’s 5-for-1 stock split on May 7, 2026. The market had priced in an almost certain bankruptcy, following the company’s acquisition of ADESA during a period of rising rates and a softening used-car market.
Flash-forward to May 2026 and the stock is trading near $70 on a split-adjusted basis, meaning a $11,000 investment to time December 2022 low is worth just over $1 million.
Restructured debt, aggressive cost cutting and an improved used-car market all played a part in turning around CVNA’s trajectory. The company’s revenue grew from $13.7 billion in 2024 to $20.3 billion in 2025 (an increase of 49%), with net income of $1.9 billion and retail units sold jumping 43%.
None of this was visible at the bottom. Carvana lost about 98% of its value in 2022 before bouncing. Buying at $3.70 meant putting real money on the line even as most analysts, much of Wall Street and many of its own bondholders, thought Carvana was off to the junk yard.
AppLovin (APP) closed at $9.30 on December 27, 2022, the final week of a brutal year for growth stocks. Written off by many retail investors as a casualty of the post-pandemic mobile gaming bust, APP’s next three years will see its value jump from under $10 to near $470.
The turning point is the 2023 rollout of Axon 2.0, AppLovin’s AI-powered ad-targeting engine, which starts routing more ad spend per impression, lifting both gaming-app revenue and gross margins. The company joins the S&P 500 in 2024. By 2025, revenue reaches $5.5 billion (up 70%), with EBITDA margins above 80%.
A $21,000 buy in December 2022 is worth roughly $1.06 million in May 2026.
Palantir Technologies (PLTR) wasn’t a turnaround story. It was a battered tech stock that became the best-performing S&P 500 stock of 2024, returning 340.5% on the year. Shares closed at $6.00 on December 27, 2022, and now trade around $130 mark.
The catalyst was the April 2023 launch of the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which unlocked commercial demand that the company’s defense and intelligence DNA had previously gated. Q1 2026 revenue grew 85% year-over-year — the fastest growth Palantir has posted since its 2020 direct listing. US commercial revenue grew 133%.
A $47,000 stake at the end of 2022 was worth over $1.6 million by November 2025. The position has pulled back somewhat in 2026 amid valuation concerns, but it’s still well into multi-bagger territory with a $47,000 stake in 2022 worth $1.2 million in May 2026.
A few patterns are worth pulling out before you start scanning your watchlist for the next one.
Each of them was left for dead first. Carvana was a bankruptcy candidate. AppLovin was a beaten-down mobile ad-tech name the market had soured on. Palantir was an unprofitable software stock. SanDisk was an untested spin-off from a sleepy storage company. The 12 months before each of these stocks went vertical were the hardest months to own them or, in SanDisk’s case, the 12 months before it even existed as a standalone stock.
Each entry happened in a market panic. Three of the four bottomed in the December 2022 stretch of the 2022 bear market. SanDisk’s May 2025 low came in the aftermath of the tariff-driven selloff that pushed the S&P 500 down 19% from its February peak. Both moments did the same thing — they took good companies down with the bad.
Each rode one big narrative once the panic ended. AI infrastructure carried SanDisk and Palantir. The Axon 2.0 AI ad-targeting engine carried AppLovin. An operational turnaround, debt restructuring, cost cuts and a return to profitability carried Carvana.
The narrative did the heavy lifting, but the operating fundamentals had to validate enough of it to keep the move going. The winners had real revenue, real margins, and real cash flow to back up the story. Stocks that ran the same narratives without the cash flow — quantum names like IonQ (IONQ) and Rigetti, pre-revenue nuclear developers like Oklo (OKLO) and NuScale — mostly underperformed. When sector enthusiasm cooled in Q1 2026, the gap showed up in the price almost immediately.
Survivorship bias is doing real work here. For every Carvana that returned 100x, dozens of similarly battered 2022 names have either gone bankrupt or never recovered. Lordstown Motors and Bird filed for Chapter 11. Plug Power, Lucid, and Beyond Meat are still trading but never came back. A 2024 version of this list would have featured a half-dozen quantum stocks and SMR developers that have since given back most of what they gained.
If you want to be positioned for the next SanDisk, the playbook is the same as it’s always been: build a thesis on where capital is going, look for businesses that benefit from that thesis but are priced like they don’t, and decide in advance how much you’re willing to lose if you’re wrong. Most people skip the last part.
The first step is having a brokerage account ready when the next opportunity shows up. Different platforms offer different fees, features and account minimums, and some carry signup bonuses worth comparing before you commit.
All return figures reflect price appreciation alone, not total return with dividends reinvested. Entry prices are split-adjusted closing lows sourced from Yahoo Finance. Current prices are closing prices as of May 13, 2026. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and concentrated positions in volatile thematic stocks carry substantial risk of permanent loss of capital. This piece is editorial commentary, not financial advice.
