Enter your initial cost, the final value, any extra costs, and how long you held it — get net gain, ROI, and an annualized return you can compare across investments.
ROI (Return on Investment) measures how much you gained or lost relative to what you put in: ROI = (final value − initial cost − additional costs) ÷ initial cost × 100. It's the simplest way to express "how much did I make on this" as a single percentage, independent of the currency or dollar amount involved, which is what makes it useful for comparing very different investments side by side.
ROI is the total return over the whole period you held the investment, however long that was. Annualized return (CAGR — Compound Annual Growth Rate) normalizes that total return to a per-year rate, so you can fairly compare investments held for different lengths of time. A 50% ROI earned in a single year is a dramatically stronger result than the same 50% ROI spread across a decade, and annualized return is what makes that difference visible at a glance.
Not by itself. Raw ROI ignores risk and the time value of money — a 50% ROI over 10 years is a very different outcome from 50% over 1 year, which is exactly why annualized return matters more than headline ROI when comparing opportunities. Two investments can post the same ROI while one required far more risk or patience than the other to get there.
Only if you enter them in the "Additional costs" field above — otherwise the calculator assumes your initial cost and final value are already net figures. Add any commissions, closing costs, capital gains tax, or other fees there so they're subtracted from your gain before ROI and annualized return are calculated.
Worked example: a $10,000 investment that grows to $15,000 over 3 years with no additional costs has a net gain of $5,000 and an ROI of 50%. Annualized, that's (15,000 ÷ 10,000)^(1/3) − 1 ≈ 14.47% per year — useful context for comparing against, say, a compound interest account advertising a fixed annual rate. For a deeper look at how contributions and compounding play out over time, see the Investment Calculator.