How much you needed — across every period that actually happened

Every other one asks you to enter an expected return — usually 12% — and compounds forward from it. The answer it gives back is the number you typed in, rearranged. These pages never accept a rate. They take every 10- and 15-year period the index has actually been through, measure what each one returned, and show what your goal would have required in the worst, the middle and the best of them.

No, and we are careful not to imply it. Measured against the record, 12% lands close to the median of what the index really delivered over ten years. The problem is not the number, it is that it arrives alone: the same index has had ten-year stretches returning around 5% and others near 16%, and reaching the same goal in the weaker ones demanded nearly twice as much every month. That spread is the thing a single figure cannot tell you, and it is the thing your plan actually depends on.

Because those are the holding periods the data can describe. No index or company on this site has more than twenty years of usable price history, and describing a distribution honestly takes at least twelve complete periods — which makes fifteen years the longest window with enough of them behind it. A twenty-five-year page would have to take a ten-year rate and stretch it far past anything measured, which is a projection wearing a measurement’s clothes.

No. Every rate on these pages came from a period that has already finished. Nothing here forecasts the next ten or fifteen years, and the range shown is the range that happened rather than a confidence interval for what will. ReturnScreener is an educational research platform and is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser.

An index — the Nifty 50 where its history covers the period, and the broader Nifty 500 where it does not. A single company would have produced a far wider range in both directions, which is exactly what the rolling-returns pages show company by company. Using an index here is the conservative choice and the more realistic one for a long-term goal.