Long story short, I should have skipped the cookies

Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it? Especially in 2026 when you can use pretty much any A.I out there to really nail home the result of some interesting decisions from way back when in just a matter of moments. 

To explore this today, I'm heading back to a time where I used to reward machine with choc chip cookies and work out how better off today I'd be if I'd just put the cookie down...*

The scenario

It's 2017 and I'm working on a nightly radio show called the Greatest Years in Music. It's my first ever live hosted night show and as radio shows at that time period go, I'd usually end up being the only person in the entire building for those hours before the next night host came in and took over (hi Christian!). And while it was pretty easy to keep myself amused with the music, callers and studio internet on hand, pretty much every Friday night I found myself longing for something sweet. An 'end of the week treat' if you will.

Luckily there was a vending machine at the station so I never had to venture far and even better, it stocked those chunky vending machine chocolate chip cookies. I'm a sucker for a regular sized chocolate chip cookie when available but a big one all to myself on a Friday? #luxury! 

In my mind I felt like I'd earned this cookie for the busy week I'd just endured (whether it was a truly busy week or a dead quiet one actually - up there with the notion of a hard earned beer on a Friday, regardless of whether I'd worked up a sweat or not..) 

And so for months on end, every Friday night towards the back end of the show was vending machine cookie day. Until I got the blood results back from a doctor one day ('Have we tested you for cholesterol yet? No? Okay, I'm booking you a blood test for cholesterol'..) and the results suggested that I probably should cut back on the vending machine fare and any other cookie for that matter and eat a little better for a bit..

Which leads me to today's AI assisted hindsight reveal, namely: If I'd spent my 2017 cookie money on saving/investing and didn't touch the money until now, would I be insanely rich? Or would it be a case of 'Meh, it's only a little bit of money I missed out on here, so I don't feel so bad about this after all this time..'

Just me amusing myself one very slow night in the studio... was probably feeling like a choc chip cookie by this point.

To work this out I'm going to throw some data into Perplexity AI, get it to whip out it's crystal ball, crunch some numbers and find out how much these cookies have really cost me!

Put the cookies in a savings account

In all honesty, we're not talking millions upon millions of dollars spent here. I can't recall exactly how much the vending machine cookie was but at a rough guess, I'm going to say $3.50-$4. For the sake of this exercise, let's round it up for $4 a hit.

So that's a $4 cookie on a Friday night for roughly 6 months = 24 x $4 = $96. (Yeah I know, real breaking the bank stuff here!) 

But what if I put that money in one of my ING accounts that I'm still using to this day and left it there til now? According to Perplexity the rate on my ING account if I did the bare minimum back in 2017 was a measly 1.15% and since I know I would have done the bare minimum with the cookie money, today I would have....

$108.62

Obviously that's not factoring in any rate changes and the like but if it stayed there for 9 years at the same rate...yeah I'm not feeling bad about not doing this one at all. Forget it ING, it's choc chip cookie time!

For some reason the station had a lot of wigs handy..

Put the cookies into Bitcoin

Okay, this one I feel might just be that little bit more painful. Because at around this time I did venture into the wild west of Cryptocurrency, I made a little money, I lost a little more. And I have since watched it both rise and fall spectacularly in the nine years since 2017, never really holding it for long. But if that $98 stayed there in a wallet until now?

Average Bitcoin price back in 2017: The average Bitcoin price in Australian dollars in 2017 was around 6,000–6,500 AUD per BTC, depending on the exact averaging method and data source.

The average Bitcoin price now?: Right now Bitcoin is trading at roughly 92,000–93,000 AUD per BTC on major Australian platforms

Which means if I bought back then and finally looked at it today, my cookie collective would be worth..

Roughly $1400-$1700

Ohh, they are some expensive cookies! 

But could I go even higher (and make myself even sadder) if I sunk it into a particular skyrocketing share on the market instead?

Where did this handset come from? I never found out..

And finally, put the cookies into NVDA

(A quick note here: Back in 2017 there was no way to buy fractional shares via an app/website like I can do today, not readily available here in Australia anywhere. So it's not possible for this one to be a distant hindsight reality. But for the sake of pretending and wondering, here it is anyway.)  

Let's buy some shares with our cookie money!

Nvidia shares back then: About mid teens US
Nvidia shares now?: $202.81 US at the time of writing. 

And so if invested then and held on til now, I'd have what exactly?

From Perplexity: 

Using split‑adjusted prices, 96 USD invested in NVDA in 2017 would be worth around 4,000 USD today, assuming you bought once in 2017 and just held.macrotrends+2

Quick calculation (order‑of‑magnitude)

To keep it simple and consistent with standard historical datasets:

• A long‑term NVDA history shows the average 2017 price at about 3.69 USD per share on a split‑adjusted basis.macrotrends

• 96 USD invested in 2017 would have bought roughly
  $\text{shares}=96\mathrm{/}3.69\approx 26$ NVDA shares (split‑adjusted).

• Today, NVDA is trading at 202.81 USD per share.perplexity

• Current value:
  $\text{value now}\approx 26\times 202.81\approx \mathrm{5,273}$ USD.

That’s the “clean” estimate using the 3.69 USD 2017 average figure.

And $4000 USD equates to roughly $5734..

Which means even though this wasn't possible, ultimately the cookies weren't worth it in the end!
(I still want one now though after writing about it all night!)

*And invest/save. Obviously I couldn't be rich without doing this part!