№ 022 · Investing cluster
Stock Return Calculator
Grade a trade. Enter what you paid, what you sold for, how many shares, and how long you held — and get the dollar profit, the total return on your cost, and the annualized rate that lets you compare it against any other investment. Commissions and dividends included.
Profit · total return · CAGR
Looking forward instead of back? Project steady investing with the Investment Growth Calculator, or backtest buying in over time with the DCA Calculator. Sizing a trade before you take it? See the Position Size Calculator.
The trade01
$
$
Holding period02
Costs & income03
$
$
$
Net profit · 2 yr
+$2,500.00
50.00% total return22.47% annualized
Total return50.00%
Annualized (CAGR)22.47%
Cost basis$5,000.00
Ending value$7,500.00
Invested vs returned
Invested$5,000.00
Returned$7,500.00
The math
| Line item | How | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Cost basis | 100 sh × $50.00 | $5,000.00 |
| Sale proceeds | 100 sh × $75.00 | $7,500.00 |
| Net profit / loss | 50.00% on cost | +$2,500.00 |
How it works · methodology
The math, in the open.
cost basis = buyPrice × shares + buyFee ending value = sellPrice × shares − sellFee + dividends profit = ending value − cost basis total return = profit ÷ cost basis CAGR = (ending value ÷ cost basis)^(1 / years) − 1
- buyPrice / sellPrice
- Price per share at purchase and sale
- shares
- Number of shares traded
- buyFee / sellFee
- Commissions paid at each end
- dividends
- Cash dividends received over the hold
- years
- Holding period in years (months ÷ 12)
Assumptions & limits
- A single round-trip trade — one buy, one sell — with no assumption about the price path in between.
- Dividends are treated as cash received, not reinvested; enter the total over the holding period.
- Returns are shown before tax. A real after-tax return depends on holding period, account type, and your bracket.
- Very short holding periods can annualize to extreme figures, because a small gain is extrapolated across a full year.
By the MintNumber Editorial Team·Reviewed
Frequently asked
Questions about stock returns
What is total return versus annualized return?
Total return is the whole gain or loss over the entire time you held the stock, as a percent of what you paid — a 50% total return means you ended with one and a half times your cost. Annualized return, or CAGR, restates that as the steady yearly rate that would produce the same result. The distinction matters because a 50% total return earned over two years is a very different investment from 50% earned over ten, and only the annualized figure lets you compare holds of different lengths fairly.
How does CAGR handle a holding period that is not a whole number of years?
It uses the exact fraction. The compound annual growth rate is the ending value divided by the cost basis, raised to the power of one over the number of years held, minus one — and the years can be fractional, so an eighteen-month hold uses 1.5 and a six-month hold uses 0.5. Enter the period in months and the calculator converts it for you. Very short holds can produce eye-popping annualized numbers because a small gain is being extrapolated to a full year; treat those with caution.
Are commissions and fees included?
Yes, if you enter them. A buy fee is added to your cost basis and a sell fee is subtracted from your proceeds, so both drag on the return exactly as they do in a real brokerage account. Many brokers now charge zero commission on U.S. stock trades, in which case you can leave the fields at zero, but other costs — regulatory fees, currency conversion, contract fees on options — still apply and are worth entering if they are material.
What about dividends?
Dividends you received while holding the stock can be entered as a single total, and they are added to your ending value, which is how a proper total-return figure is built — price appreciation plus income. The calculator does not assume the dividends were reinvested; it treats them as cash received. If you reinvested them into more shares, the simplest approach is to model that as a separate purchase, or to use the compound interest calculator for a reinvestment projection.
Does this account for taxes?
No — the result is a pre-tax return. In a taxable account a profit is usually a capital gain, taxed at the long-term rate if you held the shares more than a year and at your ordinary income rate if you held them less, and dividends have their own tax treatment. Your after-tax return will be lower than what this shows. Inside a tax-advantaged account such as an IRA or 401(k), gains are not taxed as they occur.
How is this different from the compound interest or investment growth calculators?
This calculator measures the return on one round-trip trade you can describe completely — a buy price, a sell price, a share count — and works out what actually happened. The compound interest and investment growth calculators project forward from assumptions about a rate and ongoing contributions. Use this one to grade a trade you made or are considering; use the others to estimate where steady investing could take you.