Investment Guides
How compounding, returns and inflation actually behave over a long run.
Apple stock 10 year return
$10,000 became $129,716 with dividends reinvested — and the ten months that did most of the work.
Read →What is compound interest?
Interest on your interest — where a long-run balance actually comes from, and why inflation changes the answer.
Read →Investment guides
Investing arithmetic is not complicated, but it is unintuitive. Compounding produces most of its result in the final years of a long run, not the early ones, and the difference between a nominal return and a real one is large enough to change decisions. These guides work through the parts that surprise people.
What compounding actually does
Put $500 a month into an account paying 6% and after thirty years you will have contributed $180,000 and hold about $502,000. Nearly two-thirds of that balance is growth. In the first decade the proportion is closer to a quarter — you do most of the work early and the account does most of it late, which is the entire case for starting sooner rather than contributing more.
What a real ten years looks like
Averages hide the experience. Our breakdown of the Apple stock 10 year return takes one well-known stock and shows where the growth actually came from: two years produced most of it, ten months out of a hundred and twenty carried three quarters of the final value, and the position fell more than 20% three separate times along the way.
Use them with the calculators
Reading about compounding is less useful than watching it happen to your own numbers. The compound interest calculator projects a savings plan forward, and the stock and investment calculator does the same for a portfolio using real historical prices.
Nothing here is investment advice. These are explanations of arithmetic, not recommendations about what to buy.