A similar thing happened for the Canadian stock index which boasts of
arithmetic average returns of 10.4 % per year from 1970 through 2015 but investors only compounded their money at an average rate of 9.0 % annually in practice.
I demonstrated how 3 portfolios with the identical
arithmetic average returns (i.e. 5 %) can provide different portfolio total returns, depending on their volatility.
The average investor is often misled by the media and institutions which incorrectly use
the arithmetic average return.
Not exact matches
• It is an undeniable
arithmetic fact that the
average return of all active investors will equal the
average return of all passive investors, less costs.
While the annualized (geometric
average)
return is different from the
arithmetic average required in the SR calculation, it should suffice as a rough equivalent.
They estimate premiums for these two risk measures as the difference in
average (
arithmetic mean)
returns between the riskiest and least risky quintiles in excess of the Treasury bill (T - bill) yield.
Arithmetic averages will always over state investment
returns unless there is zero volatility.
The simple, or
arithmetic,
average annual
return would be (60 % plus -50 %) divided by 2.
Recalculate the
average annual
return using
arithmetic math and you can see that compounding actually increased the rate of
return on the annuity to over 8 % per year.
• It is an undeniable
arithmetic fact that the
average return of all active investors will equal the
average return of all passive investors, less costs.
Most people calculate an
arithmetic return, which is a simple
average over over a period of years.
We used three measures to capture the pertinent information:
return on equity (ROE) to reflect growth and profitability; the debt coverage ratio to represent the likelihood of default; and the accruals - to -
average - total - assets measure defined by Sloan (1996) to quantify possible accounting red flags.12 To arrive at company - specific quality measures, we used the simple
arithmetic average of each stock's percentile rank for these three variables.