On the Tickers and Compare pages you'll see a toggle next to the chart:
Price | Total Return
The two toggles are independent — turn either one on, the other on, or
both at once. With both active, the chart draws two lines so you
can see exactly how much of a fund's performance came from price movement vs.
reinvested dividends.
What each line shows
-
Price: the split-adjusted closing price over time.
Splits are reflected (so a 3-for-1 split doesn't show as a 67% drop), but
dividends are not reinvested. This is the line that matches what
you'd see on a typical broker quote.
-
Total Return: the value of a hypothetical position that buys one
share at the start of the visible range, then reinvests every cash distribution
(regular dividends, special dividends, capital-gain distributions, return-of-capital)
back into the security at the ex-dividend day's closing price, and adjusts for any
splits along the way. It answers:
"If I had owned this fund and reinvested every dividend, what would my position
be worth today?"
The math
For each bar in the visible window, we plot:
- Price line: the bar's split-adjusted close (the raw
close column from our data feed).
-
Total Return line: the bar's
split + dividend adjusted close. This is the standard back-adjusted close
used by every research platform — it back-fills the historical price series so the
most recent bar equals the actual close, and earlier bars are deflated by the
cumulative dividend yield since each ex-date. Because of this back-adjustment, the
two lines start at different values in the past and converge at today's close.
The percent change shown in the legend, header, and tooltip is calculated against
the first bar in the visible range, for each line independently:
return % = (last_value − first_value) ÷ first_value × 100
So the gap between Price % and Total Return % is, by definition, the contribution
from reinvested cash distributions over the visible window.
Data source
Daily bars come from EODHD's end-of-day API. Each bar carries both the
split-adjusted close and the split + dividend adjusted close, so switching modes (or
showing both at once) requires no extra network calls. Corporate actions — splits,
spin-offs, special dividends — are applied by EODHD as soon as the official record
date is published.
Assumptions and caveats
-
Frictionless reinvestment. We assume every dividend is reinvested
at the ex-date close with no commissions, no bid/ask spread, and fractional shares
allowed. Your real-world brokerage DRIP may settle at a slightly different price
and may not allow fractional shares.
-
Reinvestment timing — ex-date by default, with a pay-date+1 option.
The default plots reinvestment at the ex-date closing price, matching the
industry-standard convention used by Bloomberg, S&P, MSCI, and every published
total-return index. The math is unambiguous and reproducible: on ex-date the share
price drops by approximately the dividend amount, and reinvesting at that same
close offsets the drop exactly. In real life, though, you cannot actually reinvest
a dividend until the cash hits your account on the pay date, which is
typically 1–4 weeks after the ex-dividend date. Use the "Pay+1" toggle in the chart
header to reinvest at the close of the first trading day strictly after pay date —
a more realistic model of a retail DRIP, at the cost of being non-reproducible
against published index returns. The practical difference is usually small but can
be a few basis points per distribution on volatile or high-yielding names.
-
Reinvestment % slider. When Total Return is on, a slider next to
the toggle lets you dial reinvestment from 0% to 100%. The un-reinvested portion
of each distribution is consumed as income — it leaves the portfolio entirely and
does not compound. 100% (the default) matches the standard total-return
calculation that EODHD's adjusted close encodes. 0% turns Total Return into a pure
price line. Intermediate values model "I lived off some of the dividends" scenarios:
for example, 50% reinvested and 50% taken as income approximates a partial DRIP
where half the cash funds living expenses. The math is a linear blend per bar
between the price return and the full-reinvestment return weighted by the slider
value, so flipping between 100% and 0% smoothly fans the line from the EODHD `ac`
path down to the raw `c` path.
-
Gross of taxes. The line shows pre-tax total return. If you hold
the fund in a taxable account, your after-tax return will be lower; the tax impact
depends on whether the distribution is a qualified dividend, ordinary income, or
return of capital.
-
Currency. All figures are in USD using the security's home-market
close. We don't track foreign-listed securities, so FX is not a factor.
-
Toggle visibility. On the Tickers page, the Price | Total Return
toggle is hidden when the visible window contains no distributions — the two lines
would render identically, so showing the toggle would be misleading.
-
Compare page normalization. When two or more tickers are selected,
every line is normalized to percent change from the start of the visible range so
funds at very different price levels (e.g. $30 vs. $500) can be compared head to
head. With both Price and Total Return on, you'll see two lines per ticker (solid
for Price, dashed for Total Return).
Why the lines diverge over long ranges
On a high-yield monthly-distributing fund (think JEPQ, QYLD, QQQI, SPYI), the
difference between the two lines can be dramatic over 5+ year windows because
distributions compound. On a low-yielder (e.g. QQQ, SCHG), the two lines barely
separate. That gap is the "dividend story" for the fund — exactly what the Total
Return view is designed to surface.
jumps instantly to the minimum, while Shift +
jumps to the maximum.
