Comparison tool for market performance of
Total Returns of a few Stocks and Funds

This calculator compares the compounded Total Return growth (which includes reinvested dividends and compounding) of up to 11 year spans of performance of about 100 tickers of popular stocks and a few funds. Except for Roku and Shopify, the companies here are all in the S&P 500 (of which the top 50+ and a few others and a few funds are included here). The calculator provides a few ways of looking at things.

You can even temporarily add a few of your own favorite stocks or funds here to see the performance comparisons. Option 6 makes it easy to Copy/Paste the data from the Morningstar Total Return %. Just drag the mouse across the numbers on that Morningstar data line to highlight the Total Return % numbers, and then directly Paste here. Also there is a calculator #3 that will provide the same Copy/Paste of the Morningstar Total Return % numbers. Morningstar shows the past ten years (plus the current YTD) of these annual Total Return numbers (which for stocks are at the Price vs Fair Value tab, or for funds are at the Performance tab). Total Return includes compounding and reinvested dividends, less fund fees.

Most of the last 10 years have been generally good to very good market years for the S&P 500. However 2022 was very seriously negative for all, especially for growth stocks and funds, with pretty much an extreme top to bottom reversal in this table for the growth stocks. The S&P 500 was down -25% at bottom on 12 October 2022. There is also a S&P 500 50 year gain history calculator.

But so far 2023 is suddenly a little different, the growth stocks are starting to reverse back, so do check a sort on 2023 only. The S&P 500 is still down about -12% (from the past high well more than a year ago), but some of the worst hit companies shown here now have positive gains of 20% to 100% in 2023 so far (from the bad 2022 year), which normally would be great gains for an entire year. Of course, this is still bad times, and there's still more recovery to go, but it is looking better than last year so far. Recovery might be slow until the next election, but Good stocks will recover. The market has always recovered, and the gain will look much better after recovery. This "Recovery Needed" is calculator #4 on next page.

Recovery Needed if a stock or fund is Down this percent
Down	10%	20%	30%	40%	50%	60%	70%	80%
Recovery gain	11.1%	25%	42.5%	66.7%	100%	150%	233%	400%
to 100% Value	1.11x	1.25x	1.43x	1.67x	2x	2.5x	3.33x	5x

In this calculator,

• You can sort performance of all tickers in any one year, or in your selected span of years (2013-2023).
• Annualized Return must Not be computed if the incomplete current year is included in the Span of years (that future is not known yet).
• Option 4 can compare all years of all tickers to all years of any other one ticker in the chart.
• Option 5 shows Annualized Total Return of the Span for all tickers (except the partial year 2023 YTD).
• Option 6 can temporarily add your own ticker choices into the table for comparisons (highlighted in yellow).

Four of the tickers (SHOP, GOOG C, PYPL, ROKU) here began later, so are missing a few early years of data (before that ticker existed). So if the last two columns (Gain and Annualized) have light blue color, it indicates some of the first span years (like 2013) have blank data. Or if both of the last two columns are blank, none of the selected span years had any data. It does compute accurate Gain numbers for the existing years, but a shorter year span is Not directly comparable to the others (Not the same years).

Annualized Return (Gain) is for whole years, and must not be computed if the data span includes an incomplete year, like the current year. It cannot be computed correctly then because the future is unknown. To see Annualized Return here, remove 2023 from the year span. That current year does show current YTD gain OK, but the future gain is unknown, and it will change every new market day. If no blank data years are included (no blue cells), the Annualized sort ORDER is the Same ORDER as the Gain column, and if span is only one single past year, Annualized is also same VALUE as the Gain column. The significance of the Annualized numbers is for a span of several years. (See a detailed description of Annualized Return.)

Annualized Return is the meaningful way to compare stock performance. It's useful and important because stock years have varied performance, some years are up big, some years less, or even a few years may be negative, and then those results are compounded by following years. So the actual gain performance over several years is not obvious. We can see the overall gain that was achieved, but that number depends on the number of years. To know a rate of gain that can be compared, Annualized Return computes a rate from the SAME compounded gain, but AS IF IT HAD BEEN A FIXED ANNUAL RATE, that same rate every year, which is the more logical way to compare actual long term performance. It computes the annual FIXED RATE that would give the SAME GAIN result in the SAME TIME PERIOD, which is then more comprehensible and is comparable to others.

Current bond fund performance examples:

Link	Name of Vanguard fund	SEC Yield 5/25	1 year Return 4/30	Bond Duration 3/31
VMFXX	Federal Money Market	5.04%	3.05%	No loss
VFSUX	Short Term Bond	4.85%	1.78%	2.7 years
VSCSX	Short-Term Corporate Bond Index	4.99%	1.71%	2.7 years
VFIDX	Intermediate Term Bonds	5.00%	-1.70%	6.3 years
VBLAX	Long Term Bond Index	4.82%	-4.33%	14.5 years

Investing in bonds is very different than stocks. Increasing interest rates cause newly purchased bonds to pay more, but then resale value of existing bonds go down (less desirable to buy). However, if possible to hold until maturity, directly held bonds do still redeem at face value. Fighting the current high inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve has continued increasing interest rates, so resale value of existing bonds are dropping. Bonds can be as volatile as stocks. There is more to it, see description at Things you need to know about the market.