Market Update 1st June 2026

Who wants to be a millionaire?

I know someone who was recently on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, spoiler they are not a millionaire, but they did win some money. But it got me thinking about when the show first started and the difference of a million pounds today versus when the show first aired in September 1998 and how much it would be worth now if you’d invested the million pounds in various markets.

Since September 1998 cumulative inflation has been around 100%. If you won a million pounds back then and hid it under a mattress its purchasing power would have halved. Or looked at another way, the prize money today should be £2m by now, but who wants to be a two millionaire doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Let’s pretend the first person to ever be on the show won £1million and that they invested it straight away in for an example the UK All Share, the S&P500, and let’s be cautious, gold and UK Gilts, you would be correct in assuming the return is more than inflation.

If you invested £1million in the UK All share in September 1998 your investment would have gone up about 502%. Now this isn’t a plain sailing ride over the decades, there will have been three instances where you would have less money than you started with but if you had remained fully invested you would now have a total of £6.02m.

Let’s try another market. The US is by far the most dominant market in global equity, so I’ll use the S&P 500. As you can imagine this is a much more lucrative trade. The investment would be up 1,150%, giving you a total of £12.5m today. The same can be said here as the UK equity market, that there were three instances of significant drawdowns in this market, but remaining invested is what would have made it worth it in the end.

Gold has risen by far, the most. The dollar gold price in September 1998 was $282 and as at the time of writing it is $4,424. This is an increase of around 1,468% leaving you with a total of £15.7m if you invested £1m in 1998.

And finally, UK gilts. For this I’ve used the UK Conventional Gilts All Stocks Index. This is probably the most cautious of all the options and I’m guessing if you won £1million on a game show you might have a higher risk appetite so wouldn’t choose this option for your whole investment. Anyway, investing in this index your return would be 142%, so still a good amount above inflation. The UK gilt market suffered significantly in 2022 and hasn’t really recovered, but if you include coupons then that’s where it will have made the difference over the time horizon.

As I mentioned above there were a few times in those early years where the amount you would have invested would be worth less, particularly in the early 2000s and during the financial crisis drawdowns. In the GFC peak to trough drawdowns were around 57% for the MSCI World. If you started investing in say 2018/2019 you would have experienced similar drawdowns in recent years. The 2020 Covid drawdowns saw a peak to trough drawdown of 34% for the MSCI World. Similarly, the Trump tariffs of last year and more recently the war in Iran led to sharp but shallower drawdowns. But as you have probably heard, markets are at all-time highs again, so it is key to remain invested and keep the compounding of those returns.

Now, obviously, the show didn’t begin with millionaires. The first contestant to play the game banked £64,000, and it wasn’t until November 2000 that anyone actually answered the million pound question correctly. Since then, just seven people have made it all the way. But the more revealing moment came in a recent episode. A contestant reached the final question but chose to walk away with £500k. They locked in a very good outcome rather than risk everything for a perfect one. And in the real world, that’s often the winning move.

Emily Cave – Research Analyst

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