Pick any stock, ETF or crypto, choose an amount and a date, and see exactly what that money would be worth today — with dividends reinvested and the S&P 500 alongside for comparison.
Ready-made answers for the assets people ask about most — each one precomputed from real month-end prices.
Five steps, about thirty seconds.
Pick the asset
Search for any stock, ETF or cryptocurrency by name or symbol. The popular chips are one click.
Enter an amount
Whatever you would have put in. It's in the asset's own trading currency, so there is no hidden exchange-rate effect.
Choose how you invested
One lump sum, or the same amount every month — dollar-cost averaging, which is what most people actually do.
Set the start date
Use a quick pick, or type an exact date. If the asset listed later than that, the tool starts on its first trading day and tells you.
Read the result, then the caveats
The big number is the value today. The S&P 500 line underneath is the honest comparison — most single stocks lose to it.
The maths is easy; reading it well is the hard part.
Always look at the S&P 500 line. A 300% return sounds spectacular until you see the index did 290% of it with a fraction of the single-company risk.
Survivorship bias is the trap. Tesla and Nvidia are on this list because they won. The companies that went to zero don't have a page.
Switch to monthly contributions before you get too excited. Dollar-cost averaging produces a much smaller total on a rising asset — and it is what an actual pay cheque allows.
Turn dividends on and off. On a dividend ETF like SCHD, reinvestment is most of the return; leaving it out understates the result badly.
Check the start date, not the date you asked for. A ticker that listed in 2020 cannot show you 2016, and a shorter window flatters a fast riser.
These are gross prices. Real returns are lower after trading costs, currency conversion and tax — sometimes by a percentage point a year.
See how the same money compounds going forward with our free compound interest calculator →
Deeper guides on our blog that build on the topics in this tool.
Every figure below is computed from the same real price series this tool uses: a $1,000 lump sum held to the snapshot date, with dividends reinvested where the asset pays them. Not everything here existed ten years ago, so each row starts on its own first trading day — the “Invested since” column says which year that is.
| Asset | Invested since | Value today | Total return | Per year (CAGR) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla | 2016 | $21,386 | +2,038.6% | +35.9% |
| Apple | 2016 | $12,638 | +1,163.8% | +28.9% |
| Nvidia | 2016 | $154,300 | +15,330.0% | +65.5% |
| Amazon | 2016 | $7,224 | +622.4% | +21.9% |
| Microsoft | 2016 | $9,802 | +880.2% | +25.7% |
| 2016 | $8,980 | +798.0% | +24.6% | |
| Meta | 2016 | $4,772 | +377.2% | +16.9% |
| Netflix | 2016 | $7,732 | +673.2% | +22.7% |
| AMD | 2016 | $72,754 | +7,175.4% | +53.6% |
| Palantir | 2020 | $17,304 | +1,630.4% | +62.8% |
| S&P 500 | 2016 | $4,177 | +317.7% | +15.4% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 2016 | $6,618 | +561.8% | +20.8% |
| SCHD | 2016 | $3,306 | +230.6% | +12.7% |
| Bitcoin | 2016 | $109,945 | +10,894.5% | +60.0% |
| Ethereum | 2017 | $6,010 | +501.0% | +22.8% |
Month-end closing prices, snapshotted 2026-08-07. Excludes trading costs, spreads and taxes. Past performance is not a prediction.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Total return | Everything the investment gave you: the price change plus dividends, expressed as a percentage of what you put in. |
| CAGR (annualized return) | The single yearly growth rate that would take the ASSET from its price at the start of the window to its price at the end, dividends included. It describes the asset, not your own cash: with monthly contributions each instalment was invested for a different length of time, so this is not the rate your account grew at. It also smooths out the ride — a 20% CAGR can hide a 60% crash along the way. |
| DRIP (dividend reinvestment) | Using each dividend to buy more of the same asset instead of taking the cash. Over decades it is often most of the total return. |
| Real return | The return after inflation — what the money can actually buy. A 7% return in a 3% inflation year is a 4% real return. |
| Benchmark | The boring alternative you have to beat. Here it is the S&P 500 via VOO, because that is what a passive investor would have earned instead. |
| Dollar-cost averaging | Investing a fixed amount at regular intervals. You buy more units when prices are low and fewer when they are high, which smooths your entry price. |
| Survivorship bias | Judging a strategy by the winners that survived to be measured. Every “what if I'd bought X” story quietly omits the companies that failed. |
| Drawdown | The peak-to-trough fall along the way. A chart ending at an all-time high can still have cost you 70% in the middle — which is when people sell. |
Enter TSLA, $1,000 and a ten-year window above and the calculator answers it from real month-end closing prices — including the S&P 500 comparison, so you can see how much of the result was Tesla and how much was simply being invested at all. There is also a precomputed Tesla page linked below.
Yes, when the asset pays them and the “reinvest dividends” switch is on, which is the default. Each dividend buys more shares at that month's price, exactly as a total-return index does. The switch disappears for assets that pay nothing — most growth stocks and all cryptocurrencies — rather than offering a control that would do nothing.
By default no: the headline is nominal, the number that would actually be in the account. Where inflation data is available, a “show in today's money” switch restates the whole path in current purchasing power, and the line beneath the result always tells you what your contributions would have to be worth just to have kept pace.
A lump sum puts all the money in on day one, so every unit of it earns the full period return. Monthly contributions buy in gradually — the last one has had no time to grow at all. Monthly almost always produces a smaller total on a rising asset, and it is what most people can actually do.
Because the asset did not trade that far back, or your date fell on a weekend or a market holiday. The tool always uses the first market close on or after your date, and shows you that date rather than the one you asked for. Palantir listed in 2020, so a 2016 question honestly gets a 2020 answer.
Month-end closing prices from public market data — the same source that powers our portfolio analysis tool — with dividend history from the same feed. Data is snapshotted rather than streamed live, so a figure may be a day or two behind the current close.
No. The figures are gross: no brokerage commission, no bid-ask spread, no currency conversion, no dividend withholding tax and no capital gains tax. In the real world those can easily cost a percentage point a year, so treat every number here as the optimistic ceiling rather than the outcome.
Because it is the return you could have had without picking anything. If your chosen stock did not beat it, the extra risk bought you nothing. Most individual stocks underperform the index over a decade; the index return is carried by the small handful of winners you are probably looking at.
Yes. Cryptocurrencies trade every day of the year, so their month-end points can land on dates the equity markets were shut; the calculator lines the two up by calendar month. Crypto pays no dividends, so the reinvestment switch stays hidden.
The result is always shown in the currency the asset actually trades in — dollars for US listings, euros or pounds for European ones — because converting would fold in an exchange-rate return that has nothing to do with the investment itself.
No. It is a history lesson with a calculator attached. Past performance tells you what happened, not what will happen, and the assets that look best here look best precisely because they already went up. Do your own research or talk to a regulated adviser.
The interactive calculator fetches current data each time you run it. The precomputed brand pages carry a visible “data as of” date and are refreshed periodically, so a page snapshot may be a few weeks behind the live tool.
This calculator shows what actually happened to a real price series — nothing more. Past performance is not a guide to future returns, and picking the winners in hindsight is easy in a way that picking them in advance is not. Prices exclude trading costs, spreads, currency conversion and taxes, all of which reduce real-world returns. Nothing here is investment advice; do your own research or speak to a regulated adviser before investing.
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