What Our 16-Year Monthly Dataset Shows
The numbers on this page come from the same monthly closing-price data that powers the Stock Investment Simulator. They cover January 2010 through April 2026, with PLTR starting in September 2020. Every figure can be reproduced by running the simulator with a $0 starting deposit and zero monthly contribution over the same range — the simulator will report the equivalent multiple.
S&P 500 — the baseline
1,119.90 → 6,575.32. A 5.9× total return over 16.25 years. Compounded growth is roughly 11.5% per year. The S&P 500 is the "do nothing clever" benchmark for the rest of the assets covered here.
NVDA — the outlier
$0.35 → $175.75 (split-adjusted). About 498× over 16 years, or roughly 47% CAGR. Almost all of this growth was concentrated in a handful of multi-year stretches; flat decade-long ranges exist inside the dataset and are easy to land on with the simulator's date picker.
TSLA — late entry, high variance
$1.59 → $381.26 (split-adjusted). Roughly 240× since June 2010, about 41% CAGR. Drawdowns of more than 50% appear multiple times. Running the simulator with start dates near the top of each cycle illustrates the difference between average outcomes and timing-dependent outcomes.
KOSPI — slower compounding
1,696 → 5,479. A 3.2× return over the same 16 years, around 7.5% CAGR. This is a direct counter to the assumption that "stocks return ~10% everywhere" — geography and index composition matter.
SK Hynix — Korean cyclical
23,100 → 897,000 KRW. About 39× since 2010, near 25% CAGR, but with cyclical drawdowns tied to memory pricing. A useful test case for the "high-CAGR, high-pain" archetype.
PLTR — short-window caveat
$9.50 → $146.49. 15× since September 2020, around 65% CAGR. A reminder that a 5-year window flatters whichever asset you pick. Stretch the date range in the simulator and the implied CAGR shifts noticeably.
What the cross-section teaches
Line the six assets up and the spread is the finding. Over roughly the same 16 years, annual compounding ran from about 7.5% (KOSPI) to about 47% (NVDA) — which means a dollar grew anywhere from 3× to nearly 500× depending on what it was in. That dispersion is the honest case for two opposite strategies at once: indexing exists because almost nobody picks the 500× asset in advance, and stock-picking persists because somebody occasionally does. What the averages hide is that both paths charged the same toll on the way: every high-CAGR asset in this table spent long stretches down 50% or more, and the index itself lost roughly a third twice. The returns above were earned by whoever held through those stretches, not by whoever forecast them.
The second lesson is about windows. PLTR's ~65% CAGR is measured over less than six years that happened to suit it; NVDA's 47% includes flat multi-year ranges that a shorter window would miss entirely. Any return number is a fact about its start and end dates as much as about the asset — which is why the simulator lets you drag both. Move a start date one year in either direction on a volatile name and watch the implied CAGR swing; that sensitivity is itself the most reproducible finding in the dataset.
How to reproduce these numbers
Open the simulator, choose the asset, set the start date to January 2010 (September 2020 for PLTR), set the end date to April 2026, set both the starting deposit and the monthly contribution to zero, and read the multiple. Identical inputs always reproduce the figures above. One caveat: the Korean assets (KOSPI, SK Hynix) were part of the original dataset but are no longer selectable in the live simulator, which is US-only — their figures remain here as recorded from the same monthly-close data.
These are descriptive statistics drawn from public monthly closes — not forecasts. Past compounding rates do not repeat. Use the simulator to test your own dates and contribution sizes before drawing any conclusions about a future plan.