Intelligence · Compare
What a lump sum would be worth today — and what you would have had to sit through to collect it. Total return, dividends reinvested, across the S&P 500 and major ETFs.
The methodology
Nothing on this page involves a decision after the first one. No entries, no exits, no view on the market. The number at the top is what happened to someone who bought once and did nothing.
These are total-return figures. Price-only charts, which is what most people look at, understate the result on any dividend payer — sometimes by a third or more over fifteen years.
The comparison against the S&P 500 ETF is on every result deliberately. Try a few names. The number of times the index wins is the finding, not a footnote.
The drawdown figures above exist because the headline number is misleading on its own. A holding that returned six times your money and fell 55% along the way is not the same experience as the chart suggests.
Owning things is the engine. Options are how you manage what you own.
This is an options education business publishing a buy-and-hold calculator, which looks contradictory until you look at what the course actually teaches: covered calls on shares you already hold, and cash-secured puts on companies you would be content to own.
Options are a tool for shaping an equity position — its income, its cost basis, its downside. They are not a replacement for owning the equity, and any course that suggests otherwise is selling something.
Prices are dividend and split adjusted, so this is total return. A price-only chart would understate the result on any dividend payer, in some cases by a wide margin.
It assumes you bought once, reinvested every dividend, and never sold — including through every drawdown in the period. That is the hard part, and no calculator shows it.
It ignores tax and currency. A Canadian holding US equities has both to think about, and the answer in Canadian dollars will differ.
Every name here is a current index member that survived. Companies removed from the index, or that failed, do not appear — which flatters every result on this page.
Past performance does not predict future results. Nothing here is a recommendation.