It may often be quite helpful to find out how your overall portfolio is actually doing over a given period of time as opposed to merely estimating such a result. While it may not be difficult to see how individual funds themselves have done by looking at sites such as Morningstar or at various other fund performance sources, your portfolio will typically include a number of funds blended together with differing percent allocations. Further, the starting point for your investments may differ from that given elsewhere or even go back longer than performance tables might show.

Why might you profit from knowing this data? Aside from mere curiosity, investors may want to see if their portfolio results are as good as they think they are, or more importantly, how they compare to what they might have earned by merely buying and holding low-cost, broad-market index funds. If it turns out that either your entire stock or bond portfolio is not performing as well as these index funds, it would suggest that going forward, perhaps you may want to emphasize your current non-broad-market-index funds less and these index funds more. In such a case, you will need to judge for yourself if that index fund outperformance was large enough and long-standing enough to cause you to re-evaluate your choices.

If, on the other hand, you find that your portfolio is actually doing better than the index funds, this suggests that you should probably stay the course with your current fund choices or selection methods. The same “large enough and long-standing enough” judgment just given should be considered in this case as well to support such a continuation.

Given the usefulness of being able to easily determine such information, I was excited to discover a website, described below, that helps you accomplish this. Additionally, I have uncovered some other useful facts that emerged when I made use of this outstanding free tool. (Note that I have no connection with this site.)

Useful Questions for Fund Investors

Let me pose some practical questions that you can now readily get answers for, answers that may prove quite surprising.

Suppose you had invested some money in just a single mutual fund, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFINX), on Dec. 31, 1999. Guess how well do you think you might have done if you just continued to hold that fund through July 31, 2016?

If you guessed somewhere around 10% per year for the entire 16 1/2 year period, you would be … well … way off. OK, how about 7%. Nope. The answer is not higher than 10% either.

Give up? The annualized rate of return was a mere 4.27%, as provided by examining a portfolio consisting of just that single fund on the above mentioned website.

Think you might have done better with the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSMX )? After all, this fund includes smaller stocks too, not just the large-cap stocks in S&P 500 index. Well, yes, but not by much – just a bit better at 4.77% annualized. I’m sure most people would have guessed that stocks would have returned more over this long period.

Ready for another big surprise? How well do you think a “plain vanilla” bond fund would have done over the same period? Better, it turns out, than either of the above. The Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (VBMFX) would have returned 5.31% annualized, once again as can be determined using this websit.