By Stacker
- A $21,000 bet on SanDisk one year ago would be worth more than a million dollars today
- Restructured debt, aggressive cost cutting and an improved used car market all played a part in turning around Carvana’s trajectory
A $21,000 bet on SanDisk (SNDK -1.58%) 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 investors’ money, as AI-mania sent NAND flash memory demand through the roof. This 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.
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.
SanDisk (SNDK)
- Entry needed to hit $1 million: ~$21,000 in April 2025
- One-year return: ~4,785% (about 48x)
SanDisk separated from Western Digital on Feb. 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.
Carvana (CVNA)
- Entry needed to hit $1 million: ~$11,000 in December 2022
- Return from entry: ~9,346% (about 93x)
Carvana (CVNA +5.05%) closed at $3.70 on Dec. 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.
AppLovin (APP)
- Entry needed to hit $1 million: ~$21,000 in December 2022
- Return from entry: ~4,776% (about 48x)
AppLovin (APP -1.47%) closed at $9.30 on Dec. 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.
Palantir Technologies (PLTR)
- Entry needed to hit $1 million: ~$47,000 in December 2022
- Return from entry: ~2,068% (about 21x)
Palantir Technologies (PLTR -0.05%) 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 Dec. 27, 2022, and now trade around the $130 mark.
What these trades had in common
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 spinoff 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 +7.45%) and Rigetti, pre-revenue nuclear developers like Oklo (OKLO +1.91%) and NuScale, mostly underperformed. When sector enthusiasm cooled in Q1 2026, the gap showed up in the price almost immediately.
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