Is there an easy "If I had left it alone" tool?

[Nika]

Now that I am dabbling in trading with small amounts, I wanted to know if there is an online tool/calculator, where I could plug in my numbers and see what I would have if I had just invested in SP500 and left that money alone.

Say I put in 1K on date A, 2k on date B and 2K on date C, how much would I have now if I had just put it in SP500 vs. doing my trades.

I think it would be good to know.

[kv968]

I don't know of any online calculator that would that. It would be nice though.

You could however go back and find the price of when think you would have invested for those dates and figure out the return that way.

That wouldn't be too bad of a method if you had a only a few dates or ranges in mind but if you were looking at many (i.e. dollar cost averaging) dates then it would become cumbersome.

[LMA]

That should be a pretty straightforward calculation. Just find the return of the S&P 500 for the period of time you want and then multiply by the amount of money you would have invested.

[thesmartnickel]

I don't know of any available calculator (although I have thought about how useful a tool it would be as well) but there is an easy way to keep track moving forward. If you have a google account, you can create a portfolio under google finance and each time you make a trade, just enter a trade in a test portfolio as if you put it in the S&P 500. I think the reason why a calculator isn't available is that you could technically use any price during that trading day so it would be more appropriate to just track it yourself.