What if you'd invested?

How this works

We take the price of your chosen asset on the start date and divide your amount by it to get the units you'd have bought. Then we value those units at every month since, up to the latest price, to draw the line. The yearly rate (CAGR) is the single compound rate that turns your starting amount into today's value over the period. The dashed line shows what the same money would have earned in National Savings at the rate you set - a safe yardstick. Prices are scraped automatically and history is monthly; treat results as close estimates, not exact statements.

The prices come from the same automated pipeline that powers the rest of this site. Stock histories are monthly closing prices built from Pakistan Stock Exchange end-of-day records and rebuilt weekly, while the latest prices in our data feed refresh twice every trading weekday - once shortly after the 09:30 open and once after the 15:30 close (scheduled runs can occasionally be delayed, so the "as of" moment may lag by a few hours). Gold uses the site's monthly 24K per-tola series going back about six years; most stock histories cover about three. The "Max" button simply uses the full history we hold for that asset, so "Max" for gold is a longer window than "Max" for a stock.

Three limitations matter. The stock lines are price-only: cash dividends are not added back or reinvested, so for steady payers the true total return was higher than the line shows. The series uses month-end values, so it skips intraday swings and anything that happened between two month-ends. And the maths ignores real-world frictions - broker commission, CDC charges and capital gains tax would all trim the profit figure before it reached your pocket.

How to read the numbers

• Compare on CAGR, not total return. "+80% in three years" sounds dramatic, but ₨1,00,000 growing to ₨1,80,000 over three years is a yearly pace of roughly 21.6% - that is the number to hold against a savings certificate or fund return.
• Subtract inflation in your head. A +12% year while CPI ran above 12% still shrank your purchasing power. Check the CPI figure in the ticker at the top of this page before celebrating a nominal gain.
• The dashed line is the honest benchmark. National Savings pays without market risk. If your asset only barely beat it - or trailed it - you carried years of volatility for little or nothing extra.
• Switch the window before you conclude anything. The same stock can look brilliant over one year and poor over three. If the result flips when you change periods, the story is mostly timing - and past performance tells you nothing reliable about the next few years.

Three honest ways to use a backtest

• Reality-check a tip. When someone insists a stock "always performs", run it over one year, three years and Max. If the claim only survives one carefully chosen window, you've learned what the tip was worth — and it took thirty seconds instead of your savings.
• Put gold in context. Gold is Pakistan's default store of value, and over stretches of rupee devaluation it has beaten most alternatives simply by not being rupees. Running the same amount through gold and a stock over the same window shows whether the stock's extra risk actually paid — a comparison most people argue about but never check. The gold page has the full six-year history.
• Feel the volatility before you commit. The line between the start and end points matters as much as the end value. A stock that finished +40% after spending a year 30% underwater is a very different proposition from one that climbed steadily — and the chart shows you which one you're looking at. If you couldn't have stomached the dip, you wouldn't have collected the finish.

Reading one run, start to finish

Say you put ₨1,00,000 into a stock three years back and the tool reports "Worth today ₨1,75,000, total return +75%, CAGR 20.5%". The 75% is the headline; the 20.5% is the comparable number. Hold it against the dashed National Savings line at, say, 13% — the stock won by about 7 percentage points a year, which is a genuine reward for equity risk. Now check the CPI pill in the ticker: if inflation averaged 15% over those years, National Savings actually lost purchasing power and the stock only modestly beat prices. Then flip the window to one year. If the same stock shows -10%, the three-year figure was mostly one strong early run — worth knowing before you extrapolate it forward. That is the whole discipline: CAGR against the safe rate, both against inflation, across more than one window.

Rupee returns are only half the story

Every figure this tool shows is in rupees, and the rupee itself has been a moving target - it has lost value against the dollar in most years, sometimes abruptly. A stock that doubled in rupees over a stretch where the rupee halved against the dollar kept your international purchasing power flat; gold's strong rupee record owes a large part to exactly this effect, since its dollar price is set abroad. You don't need to convert every result, but for any multi-year window it is worth glancing at where USD/PKR started and ended (the ticker above shows today's rate) before deciding how impressed to be. This is also why remittance-funded investors - who think partly in foreign currency - often read the same backtest very differently from rupee-only savers; our Roshan Digital Account guide covers that angle.

What a fair backtest looks like

Every backtest — ours included — flatters the past in ways worth naming. The asset list only contains stocks our pipeline currently tracks: the KSE's liquid names. Companies that collapsed and were delisted are absent, so browsing the dropdown means browsing survivors — the graveyard doesn't get a listing. That is survivorship bias, and it makes "the average stock here did well" a misleading thought. Window choice is the other flatterer: a start date at the bottom of a crash makes anything look brilliant. When a fund or influencer shows a backtest, ask what window and what universe — the honest answer usually shrinks the number. Our own lines also exclude dividends (understating steady payers) and ignore commission, CDC charges and capital gains tax — see how investments are taxed for what actually leaves your profit.

Common questions