On this page is a Stocks vs Bonds Historical Returns Calculator. It puts the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ Composite, the 10-year US Treasury, short-term cash (3-month T-bill), and a classic 60/40 portfolio on the same chart, so you can see how each one performed over history.
The Stocks vs Bonds Historical Returns Calculator
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Using the calculator
The default view grows $10,000 in each asset from 1972, where the NASDAQ data starts. Everything recomputes in real time as you change a setting.
In Calculation Options:
- Asset toggles – click any asset to show or hide it, including the 60/40 (composed of 60% S&P 500, 40% 10-year Treasury, rebalanced monthly) option which is off by default. Drop NASDAQ and the start year reaches back to 1897 (Dow) or 1872 (S&P 500 and 10-year Treasury); drop the equities and Cash and Treasury go back to 1858.
- Reinvest Dividends – on by default. Off switches the equity indices to price-only (although the bond series are total-return by construction, so they don't change).
- Adjust for Inflation – restates every series in CPI-adjusted terms.
- Start year – any year from the selected set's earliest shared year forward.
Three views are toggleable across the top:
- Growth of $10K – each asset's running balance from the start year, with a brush below the chart for date-range zoom and a log-scale toggle. Underneath is a Performance & risk table: end value, CAGR, standard deviation, Sharpe, Sortino, maximum drawdown, best and worst calendar year, and correlation to the S&P 500.
- Rolling Returns – the rolling annualized total return for each asset over a holding period you pick (1, 3, 5, 10, 20, or 30 years), overlaid so you can see how the ranking shifts by era.
- Win-rate Heatmap – for each start year and holding period, the cell is colored by the asset that 'won' that window. Cells gray out when the period runs past today.
Methodology and sources
Each asset starts from a monthly-average price (or yield) series, then is mapped to total-return level the way an investor would experience it. The five series:
- S&P 500 back to January 1871, from Robert Shiller's compiled dataset. See the S&P 500 Return Calculator for my construction.
- Dow Jones Industrial Average back to May 1896, blended from FRED DJIA and DQYDJ's historical reconstruction. See the Dow Jones Return Calculator.
- NASDAQ Composite back to February 1971, prices from FRED NASDAQCOM; recent dividends estimated from the spread between the price and total-return NASDAQ indices. See the NASDAQ Return Calculator for the full derivations and estimates.
- 10-Year US Treasury back to January 1871, on the long-history 10-year yield series from Shiller's dataset. Each month the model holds a freshly-issued par bond at the prevailing yield, ages it a month, and reprices it at the new yield with full present-value bond math. It uses the constant-maturity engine behind our Treasury Return Calculator.
- Cash (3-Month T-Bill) back to January 1858, as a blended series. The modern era uses FRED TB3MS (3-month T-bill, secondary market). 1920–1934 uses the NBER short-term US securities series (M1329AUSM193NNBR) with a +22.046 bps adjustment; pre-1920 uses NYC commercial paper rates (M13002US35620M156NNBR) with a −62.267 bps adjustment to a T-bill-equivalent. These adjustments are explained in our 2018 long-run yield curve inversions post. Cash compounds monthly at the prevailing short rate, and also serves as the risk-free rate in the Sharpe and Sortino calculations.
- CPI for the real adjustment comes from Shiller's dataset, scaled to the most recent month, with infill from FRED.
What the Performance & risk columns mean
- End value – what a $10,000 investment grew to by the end of the window.
- CAGR – compound annual growth rate, the annualized rate that turns the start value into the end value.
- Standard deviation – annualized volatility of the monthly returns; a higher number is a rougher ride.
- Sharpe – return per unit of total risk: the annualized return above the risk-free rate (our Cash series/3-Month T-Bill proxy) divided by standard deviation. Higher is better.
- Sortino – like Sharpe, but it penalizes only downside volatility, so it rewards assets whose swings are mostly to the upside.
- Max DD – maximum drawdown, the worst peak-to-trough decline over the window, measured on the monthly path.
- Best / worst yr – the best and worst single calendar-year return (December over December) in the window.
- Corr S&P – correlation to the S&P 500: how closely an asset's monthly moves track it, from +1 (lockstep) through 0 (no relationship) to −1 (opposite)
