The math for Tesla is pretty simple and you can do it for yourself.
Step 1: What has VTI's performance been from 1/1/2011 through 12/31/2020? I'm going to cut off at 2020 to simply the math by making the time period exactly 10 years.
We can get this from PortfolioVisualizer:
Growth of VTI
The total time period is 10 years and $10,000 would have grown to $36,333. That means the average annual growth (CAGR) would be 3.6333^(0.1) - 1 = 0.1377 = 13.77% which is the same number PortfolioVisualizer is showing.
Step 2: What percentage of VTI was Tesla on 12/31/2020? We can get this from advisors.vanguard.com, search for VTI, Portfolio, Holdings, Holdings details, As of 12/31/2020, Export full holdings.
Tesla was 1.38% of the fund's total holdings on 12/31/2020.
Now we will assume that at the start of the period, Tesla represented essentially 0% of the fund.
Step 3: Therefore, without Tesla, the value of VTI on 12/31/2020 would be missing 1.38% of its total value. It would only be 98.62% of its actual total value. 98.62% of $36,333 = $35,832.
And the average annual growth (CAGR) would be 3.5832^(0.1) - 1 = 0.1361 = 13.61%.
Summarizing: if VTI had never held Tesla:
Its value on 12/31/2020 would have been $35,832 instead of $36,333, or $501 less.
The average annual growth rate would have been 13.61% in stead of 13.77%, or 0.16% less.
You can get the same result even more simply in a rough back-of-the-envelope way. If Tesla was 1.38% of the total market, then at most it could have added 1.38% to the total value of VTI. But that additional 1.38% was made over a time period of ten years. So, ignoring some mathematical refinements, back-of-the-envelope we can estimate that Tesla added an average of a tenth that, or 0.138% per year. Which is the same ballpark as 0.16%.
In short, Tesla didn't really add a heck of a lot to the performance of Total Stock.
And since Zoom was, on 12/31/2020, only 0.13%, again, back of the envelope, you can attribute maybe 0.01% per year to Zoom.
I don't know why he's talking about BioNTech, BNTX. It is a German company. Contrary to what he says,according to Vanguard VTI does not hold any shares of BNTX. So its growth contributed zero to the return of VTI.
I happen to think a total stock market index fund is preferable to an S&P 500 index fund, but the difference is small. Knowing that I could ignore all the crazy noise about how "indexers" were going to be harmed dreadfully when Tesla was added to the S&P 500 was nice. But it's all mostly theoretical.
I've never found Seeking Alpha to be worthwhile.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
