Return on asset (ROA) value for a stock is reported differently on Yahoo Finance and MarketWatch
"Why there is this huge difference? I am not able to reconcile Yahoo's answer of 5.75%, even using their definition for ROA of: Return on Assets Formula: Earnings from Continuing Operations / Average Total Equity This ratio shows percentage of Returns to Total Assets of the company.   This is a useful measure in analyzing how well a company uses its   assets to produce earnings. I suspect the ""Average Total Equity"" in their formula is a typo, but using either measure I cannot come up with 5.75% for any 12-month period. I can, however, match MarketWatch's answer by looking at the 2016 fiscal year totals and using a ""traditional"" formula of Net Income / Average Total Assets: I'm NOT saying that MatketWatch is right and Yahoo is wrong - MW is using fiscal year totals while Yahoo is using trailing 12-month numbers, and Yahoo uses ""Earnings from Continuing Operations"", but even using that number (which Yahoo calculates) I am not able to reconcile the 5.75% they give." IESC has a one-time, non-repeatable event in its operating income stream.  It magnifies operating income by about a factor of five.  It impacts both the numerator and the denominator.  Without knowing exactly how the adjustments are made it would take too much work for me to calculate it exactly, but I did get close to their number using a relatively crude adjustment rule. Basically, Yahoo is excluding one-time events from its definitions since, although they are classified as operating events, they distort the financial record.  I teach securities analysis and have done it as a profession.  If I had to choose between Yahoo and Marketwatch, at least for this security, I would clearly choose Yahoo.
"Regarding SPY: ""One SPDR unit is valued at approximately 1/10 of the value of the S&P 500. Dividends are distributed quarterly, and are based on the accumulated stock dividends held in trust, less any expenses of the trust.""  (source)  These are depository receipts, not the actual stocks. Regarding IVV: ""The component stocks are weighted according to the total float-adjusted market value of their outstanding shares. The Fund invests in sectors, such as energy, information technology, industrials, financials, consumer staples, healthcare, telecom services, consumer discretionary and materials.""  (more here) VOO is the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. The tracking error seems pretty small to me.  I went to Google Finance and plotted the percent change for all four on one chart.  They lie pretty much on top of one another.  The actual dollar value of each one doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that they move up and down almost in lock-step.  There may be a larger difference going farther out, but for three separate financial products, the agreement is still remarkably good." "At the bottom of Yahoo! Finance's S & P 500 quote Quotes are real-time for NASDAQ, NYSE, and NYSE MKT. See also delay   times for other exchanges. All information provided ""as is"" for   informational purposes only, not intended for trading purposes or   advice. Neither Yahoo! nor any of independent providers is liable for   any informational errors, incompleteness, or delays, or for any   actions taken in reliance on information contained herein. By   accessing the Yahoo! site, you agree not to redistribute the   information found therein. Fundamental company data provided by Capital IQ. Historical chart data   and daily updates provided by Commodity Systems, Inc. (CSI).   International historical chart data, daily updates, fund summary, fund   performance, dividend data and Morningstar Index data provided by   Morningstar, Inc. Orderbook quotes are provided by BATS Exchange. US   Financials data provided by Edgar Online and all other Financials   provided by Capital IQ. International historical chart data, daily   updates, fundAnalyst estimates data provided by Thomson Financial   Network. All data povided by Thomson Financial Network is based solely   upon research information provided by third party analysts. Yahoo! has   not reviewed, and in no way endorses the validity of such data. Yahoo!   and ThomsonFN shall not be liable for any actions taken in reliance   thereon. Thus, yes there is a DB being accessed that there is likely an agreement between Yahoo! and the providers." The dividend is for a quarter of the year, three months. 80 cents is 3.9% of $20.51. Presumably the Div/yield changes as the stock price changes. On Yahoo, they specify that the yield is based on a particular stated date. So it's only the exact number if the stock trades at the price on that date. The point of that question is to test if the user can connect shares and stock price.  However, that being said yeah, you're right. Probably gives off the impression that it's a bit elementary. I'll look into changing it asap. According to Active Equity Management by Zhou and Jain: When a stock pays dividend, the adjusted price in Yahoo makes the following adjustment: Let T be the ex-dividend date (the first date that the buyers of a stock will not receive the dividend) and T-1 be the last trading day before T. All prices before T are adjusted by a multiplier (C_{T-1} - d_T)/C_{T-1}, where C_{T-1} is the close price at T-1 and d_T is the dividend per share. This, of course means that the price before T decreases. "@jidugger mostly got it right. It basically mean that past performance of a stock, or a basket of stocks, are not at all useful when trying to predict its future. There is no proven correlation between past and future performance. If there was such a correlation, that was ""proven"" or known, then investors would quickly exploit this correlation by buying or selling this stock, thus nullifying the prediction. It doesn't mean the specific individuals cannot predict the future stock market - hell, if I set up 2^100 different robots, where every robots gives a different series of answers to the 100 questions ""how will stock X do Y days from now"" (for 1<=Y<=100), then one of those robots would be perfectly correct. The problem is that an outside observer has no way of knowing which of the predictor robots is right. To say that stock is memoryless strikes me as not quite right -- to   the extent that stocks are valued based on earnings, much of what we   infer about future earnings relies on past and present earnings. To put it another way - you have $1000 now, and need to decide whether to invest in a particular stock, or a stock index. The ""memoryless"" property means that no matter how many earning reports you view ... by the time you see them, the stock price already accounts for them, so they're not useful to you. If the earning reports are positive, the stock is already ""too high"" because people bought it before you did. So on average, you can't use this information to predict the stock's future performance, and are better off investing in an index fund (unless you desire extra risk that doesn't come with more profitability)." that's just it, though - they are splitting up the 1%! and in most cases, especially vanguard, they are splitting up far less.  ETFs don't have 12b-1 fees. explaining why you're experiencing different returns for ETFs will almost certainly involve something other than their expense. again, this is especially true for vanguard. they have the cheapest ETFs around (though i think schwab beats them on a few now).  i can only guess at the full compensation structure. betterment likely earns money on cash reserves and  securities hypothecation (i guess?). they also charge a small fee from what i understand. finance is very slim these days.  i guess i'm wondering what your ultimate question is. if it's the inter corporate compensation structure, above is my best guess. if it's about performance, then we need to compare the ETFs you are looking at. if it's about the fees on funds, i think we covered that!  as an advisor, it's my experience that very specific inquiries about fees have a deeper concern. people hear a lot about being overcharged so cost is a very standard place for clients to initially look when trying to compare performance of portfolios or securities. Returns reported by mutual funds to shareholders, google, etc. are computed after all the funds' costs, including Therefore the returns you see on google finance are the returns you would actually have gotten. I think what's screwing up my calculation is the (reL), return on equity levereged figure. The beta for KORS apparently is -0.58, so when I use the formula reL = rf + (ßL)(rm - rf), I get -0.0048 as my reL.   Am I doing my beta wrong? Am I supposed to use a different figure for my beta?    ALSO, further in the process, when using the formula for WACC, my E/(D+E) is essentially 1.0 because market value of equity for KORS is 7bill and its market value of debt is only like 147 million.  edit: I'm beginning to believe that my beta of -0.58 is not rightly used. It's what yahoo told me, but other sources are saying that the beta of KORS is more like -0.01 or close to 0. Yes?   edit 2: Using -0.01 beta, I get a rdWACC of 2.2%. Now this seems more plausible. I did some research on negative betas and found out that they basically don't really exist aside from gold. So Yahoo must be giving me a weird beta figure. Other websites are all giving me -0.01, so I believe that is correct. This idea does not make sense for most mutual funds. The net asset value, or NAV, is the current market value of a fund's holdings, minus the fund's liabilities, that is usually expressed as a per-share amount. For most funds, the NAV is determined daily, after the close of trading on some specified financial exchange, but some funds update their NAV multiple times during the trading day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_fund I am not certain, but I believe that OppenheimerFunds does not report intraday prices.  I would call them up and ask. "Google's RSI is using a 10 period on 2 minute bars - i.e. it is based upon the last 20 minutes of data. Yahoo's RSI is using a 14 period lookback on an undetermined timeframe (you could maybe mouse-over and see what incremental part of the chart is giving) and given the ""choppier"" price chart, probably 30 second or 1 minute bars.   Given the difference in both the period specified and the periodicity of the charts - you should expect different results." The value of a share depends on the value of the company, which involves a lot more than the value of its assets -- it requires making decisions about what you think will happen to the company in the future. That's inherently not something that can be reduced to a single formula, at least not unless you can figure out how to represent your guesses and your confidence in them in the formula ... and even if you could do all that it would only say what you think the stock is worth; others will be using different numbers and legitimately get different results. Disagreement over value is what the stock market is all about, I'm afraid. I should have been clearer but my point was that the NYSE seems to be blaming third party vendors for reporting invalid test data but their own website reported the same data so it seems like there might be another issue.   Edit: Found the full comment. It seems that NASDAQ distributed the test data and other parties including the NYSE incorrectly displayed it. I can (barely) understand some third parties incorrectly reporting this data but it seems really bizarre that NYSE wouldn't know how to handle this. In your other question about these funds you quoted two very different yields for them. That pretty clearly says they are NOT tracking the same index. In my experiences most hedge funds won't have a benchmark in their mandate and are evaluated based upon absolute returns.  Their benchmarks are generally cash + x basis points.  So, no attribution and no IR.  No experience at all with CTA's though, so not sure how things are there.