I must be doing something wrong. Can anyone explain?
I noticed something very odd and disturbing. Motley Fool’s numbers don’t match Charles Schwab’s. For almost every stock in my portfolio, MF is showing one number for percent growth over five years, and Charles Schwab is showing a lower number.
On MF, when you go to a stock’s main page, you can view the chart in “price” or “versus S&P”. If you choose the 5 year chart, choose Versus S&P, and navigate to the end of the chart, it gives you percent growth over 5 years, for both the stock and the S&P
So let’s just start with the S&P (VOO). MF says it’s grown 90% over 5 years, CS says 73%…
CRWD - MF 78, CS 56
ANET - MF 618, CS 554
LRCX - MF 358, CS 264
TSM - MF 168, CS 140
AXON - MF 127, CS 104
MSFT - MF 95, CS 61
What the heck is happening here? I must be doing something wrong. Can anyone explain?
Just a guess, but my first instinct is that one (MF) includes dividends in return while the other (Schwab) is price appreciation only. Should be relatively easy to confirm if you dig into the smallish print on each site.
Except that nearly half of the examples (CRWD, ANET and AXON) don’t pay dividends.
And in the mean time, Yahoo Finance Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) Stock Price, News, Quote & History - Yahoo Finance says that VOO went from a close of 361.05 on 2/8/21 to a close of 635.24 on 2/6/26. Granted, that is a couple days short of exactly 5 years because of how the weekends fall. The way I calculate that [(635.24/361.05) - 1], that’s a 75.09% increase. However, when you look at the Yahoo Finance page, it says it’s a 78.22% increase.
So your best bet may be to do the calculations yourself, in a consistent manner. You can use the other sites as estimates if you want - comparing different investments within that site, but not across different sites.
