Search a ticker to simulate a range for the year ahead.

The S&P 500, one year simulated

Last close$764.35

Actual price90% of runs50% of runs50th percentile run
Run drawn
History

Price a year out

Where the 2,000 simulated years finished.

  1. Today's price is $764. The chance of ending the year below it is 28%.
  2. The mean is $831.
  3. The median is $825: in half of the simulated years the price ends below it.
  4. The mean is $6 above the median — a gap of 0.7%. The larger this figure, the more a few very good years have pulled the average up.
Today $764Median $825Mean $831Below today 28%Above today 72%
How this is made

Where the centre comes from

The middle of the band is the return CAPM expects. CAPM starts from the risk-free rate — what a Treasury bond pays — and adds a premium for taking on stock-market risk. How much premium depends on beta, a number for how strongly the asset has moved with the market. A beta of 1 moves with the market and is expected to earn the market premium; a beta of 2 moves twice as hard and is expected to earn twice the premium. In short, expected return = risk-free rate + beta × market premium.

How the paths are drawn

Each path is one possible year, drawn many times over. It starts at today’s price and drifts at the CAPM return above, while its day-to-day swings are as large as this asset’s own swings over the past few years — its historical volatility. Repeating that thousands of times gives thousands of different years. The band is the range most of them passed through, and the bell curve is how they were spread out at year end.

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