SPY total return since 2016, after removing the best single days
Answered against 22 years of US equities and 12 years of US options data and published with the query that produced it. This result is stored as of 2026-07-16, from What Missing the Best Days Costs.
| best_days_missed | total_return_pct |
|---|---|
| 0 | 275.5 |
| 10 | 97 |
| 20 | 42.4 |
| 30 | 9 |
| 50 | -32.5 |
- Rows × columns
- 5 × 2
- Computed
- Completeness
- No missing values
- Source
- US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data
- Licence
- Strasmore terms · free, no signup
What each column holds
| Column | Type | Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
best_days_missed |
number | 0 to 50 | |
total_return_pct |
number | -32.5 to 275.5 | percent |
Computed from Strasmore's warehouse of US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data. Equity prices are delayed; options greeks and implied volatility are end-of-day. This result is stored, not recomputed on load — it is exactly the numbers that were returned on , and the query below is what returned them.
Run it yourself
This is the exact query behind the result above. Change a ticker, a date or a column and run it against the warehouse — no account, no key. The no-signup tier is smaller than the one this page was computed on; a query that reaches past it comes back saying which plan runs it.
WITH daily AS (
SELECT toDate(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York')) AS dt,
argMax(toFloat64(close), toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York')) AS c
FROM global_markets.delayed_stocks_minute_aggs
WHERE ticker = 'SPY' AND window_start >= '2016-01-01'
AND (toHour(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York')) * 60
+ toMinute(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York'))) BETWEEN 570 AND 959
GROUP BY dt
),
rets AS (
SELECT dt, c / lagInFrame(c) OVER (ORDER BY dt) - 1 AS ret FROM daily
),
ranked AS (
SELECT log(1 + ret) AS lr, row_number() OVER (ORDER BY ret DESC) AS rnk
FROM rets
WHERE ret IS NOT NULL AND ret > -0.5 AND ret < 0.5
)
SELECT k AS best_days_missed,
round((exp(sumIf(lr, rnk > k)) - 1) * 100, 1) AS total_return_pct
FROM ranked
CROSS JOIN (SELECT arrayJoin([0, 10, 20, 30, 50]) AS k) AS kvals
GROUP BY k
ORDER BY k
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