
Originally Posted by
makie
YTD is a year's growth for your investment. For example, you invested P10,000 during the first day of the year and the hypothetical YTD is 40% at the end of the year. By the end of the year, your investment will grow to P14,000 from P10,000. That goes the same for the 3-year and 5-year returns.
It's fairly easy to do the calculations if you never added any amount after you invested. However, in most cases, people add more to their investments in either regular or random intervals which makes calculations a little more complicated. In this case, you'll do cost averaging. In cost averaging, you divide your investments by the current NAVPS (price per share) to know the number of shares that you own. In time, the NAVPS will either go up and down and the return of your investments will be based on the number of shares that you own. Just keep track of the number of shares that you own and multiply it with the current NAVPS, that's your investment plus the growth (or minus the loss).
Back to the YTD, for me, the YTD is just merely a basis of how good the company is doing.