The return is the easy part
Anyone reading this page already knows NVIDIA went up. What a backtest adds is the shape of the path — and the path is where the story stops being comfortable. The maximum drawdown below is measured on daily closes, so it is the real peak-to-trough a holder sat through, not the tidier figure you get from month-end data.
Read that number as a duration, not a percentage. A fall of that size takes months to happen and longer to recover, and every one of those days offered a reason to sell.
Two splits, and why the curve has no cliffs
NVIDIA split 4-for-1 in July 2021 and 10-for-1 in June 2024. On a raw price chart both look like the stock collapsed overnight. Prices here are split-adjusted, so the curve runs through them continuously — which is what actually happened to anyone holding the shares, since a split changes the share count and the price together and leaves the position untouched.
What this page cannot tell you
- It was chosen with hindsight. A page for the semiconductor company that did not work out would look very different, and nobody searches for it. Read the result knowing which company you picked and when.
- One window is one sample. Move the start date above by a couple of years and the annualized figure moves a long way. That sensitivity is a property of a single volatile stock, not a flaw in the test.
- Dividends are noise here. The payout exists but is negligible against the price move — the exact inverse of the dividend funds elsewhere on this site.
Sources
Sector, listing date and split history from Financial Modeling Prep's company profile and corporate-actions feeds. Prices are their split-adjusted end-of-day closes.