Quotable stock market return stats

A $10,000 investment in an S&P 500 index fund at the start of January 1993 would be worth about $308,938 as of June 2026, a total return of +2,989.4%, or roughly 10.8% a year compounded over about 33.4 years.

This is the benchmark every stock on the site is measured against. Price return only, before dividends, taxes, or fees.

On monthly closing prices, the S&P 500 fell 50.8% from its peak in October 2007 to its low in February 2009 and did not climb back to its October 2007 level until August 2012, about 4.8 years after the peak. An investor who sold at the bottom locked in that loss; one who held through it eventually recovered.

The site's own worst-drawdown figure for the broad market. Selling near the trough turns a temporary paper loss into a permanent one.

The largest gain on any page here is Nvidia bought in 1999: a $1,000 stake would be worth about $5,513,779 as of June 2026, a total return of +551,278%. That single entry landing at the top is survivorship in plain sight, one name that happened to run.

Ranked across all 849 company-year pages by total price return. The outlier is the point, not the plan.

Among positions held at least ten years, the highest compound annual return on the site belongs to Nvidia from 2015, at about 68.9% a year over roughly 11.6 years. Compounding at that pace for that long is what turns a small stake into a large one, not any single good year.

Annualized (CAGR) return, not total return, so short holding windows cannot inflate it. The lesson is time in the market, not timing.

Of the 173 companies tracked from their earliest available start year, 97, about 56.1%, went on to beat a same-period S&P 500 index fund, and the rest matched or trailed it. Picking the winners in advance is the hard part, because the index quietly keeps pace with most of them.

One row per company at its earliest tracked entry, each compared to the S&P 500 over the identical window. Survivorship favors the stocks here, so the real-world share beating the index is likely lower.

15 of the 173 companies tracked from their earliest start year are still underwater on a buy-and-hold basis, and the worst of them, Energy Fuels from 2006, has lost about 91.7% of its value. Big winners get the headlines, but real money was lost here too.

Total price return below zero, measured from each company's earliest tracked entry to the latest close. A reminder that the same dataset holds the losers alongside the winners.

Investing the same total dollars all at once beat spreading them out month by month on 723 of the 849 company-year scenarios on the site, while averaging in won on the other 126. Lump sum tends to win against a steady riser; averaging in tends to win when the price spent time below where it started.

Each scenario contributes a fixed $100 a month from its start year and is compared to deploying the identical total as a single lump sum at the beginning. Computed from the monthly close series, not a rule of thumb.