Put up to five tickers on one chart. Every line is rebased to zero at the start of the window, so a $600 stock and a $4 stock can be read against each other directly. Works for stocks and ETFs.
| Ticker | Start | Latest | Total Return |
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Total return is measured on closing prices from the first trading day in the selected window. It does not include dividends, so income-heavy funds will understate here relative to their true total return. Data from public market feeds and may be delayed. Educational use only, not investment advice.
Most charts show price return, which is simply where the stock traded then against where it trades now. Total return adds dividends back in, assuming they were reinvested.
For a growth stock that pays nothing, the two numbers are identical. For anything with a meaningful yield they diverge sharply over time, and the longer the window the wider the gap. Comparing a dividend payer against a non payer on price return alone systematically understates the dividend payer, sometimes by a very large margin over a decade.
This is the single most common error in casual stock comparisons, and it is why the comparison here is built on total return.
Any comparison of two stocks is really a comparison of two stocks over one specific window, and moving that window changes the result. A stock that crashed in March and recovered by June looks like a disaster measured from February and a triumph measured from April.
This is not a flaw in the data, it is how returns work, but it is routinely abused. If someone is showing you a comparison that begins on an oddly specific date, the date was probably chosen because of what it produces.
Check more than one window before concluding anything. If a relationship only holds over one timeframe, it is a coincidence rather than a finding.
Comparisons are most useful between genuine alternatives. Two companies in the same industry, a stock against the index or sector ETF that contains it, or the same company against the benchmark it claims to beat.
Comparing unrelated businesses produces a number without producing meaning. That a biotech outperformed a utility over three years tells you about risk appetite during that window, not about either company.
The most useful comparison most people never run is a single holding against a plain index fund over the same period. It is the only honest test of whether picking the stock was worth the effort.
Each line is rebased so every stock starts at the same point, which makes relative performance readable regardless of the share prices involved. A stock trading at four hundred dollars and one trading at six can be compared directly, because the chart plots percentage change rather than price.
Watch the shape as much as the endpoint. Two stocks can finish at the same return having taken completely different routes, and the one that got there without a sixty percent drawdown was a very different thing to hold.
Past performance is a record, not a forecast. Two stocks that tracked each other for five years can decouple permanently the moment something changes in one of the underlying businesses.
The comparison also excludes tax treatment, trading costs and the spread, all of which are real and none of which appear on a chart. Dividends are assumed reinvested at the time they were paid, which is the standard convention but will not match any individual's actual experience.