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Ten years of yearly estimates: the mean moves far more than the volatility

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 2026-08-16, from When Equal Weight Beats Optimization.

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Ten years of yearly estimates: the mean moves far more than the volatility — 6 rows by 3 columns, computed from US exchange, SIP and OPRA data.
tickermean_estimate_range_pctvol_estimate_range_pct
NVDA184.728.6
AAPL94.928.9
MSFT76.229
SPY44.926.7
JNJ30.719
KO23.925.4
Rows × columns
6 × 3
Computed
Completeness
No missing values
Source
US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data
Licence
Strasmore terms · free, no signup
Formats
JSON · CSV · the SQL below

What each column holds

Column definitions for Ten years of yearly estimates: the mean moves far more than the volatility, derived from the stored result.
ColumnTypeRangeNotes
ticker text 6 distinct values (AAPL, JNJ, KO…)
mean_estimate_range_pct number 23.9 to 184.7 percent
vol_estimate_range_pct number 19 to 29 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.

the exact SQL behind every number
WITH prices AS
(
    SELECT
        ticker,
        date,
        toFloat64(max(close)) AS c
    FROM global_markets.stocks_daily_aggs
    WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'SPY', 'KO', 'JNJ')
      AND date >= '2015-01-01'
      AND date <  '2025-01-01'
    GROUP BY ticker, date
),
rets AS
(
    SELECT
        ticker,
        date,
        c / lagInFrame(c, 1) OVER (PARTITION BY ticker ORDER BY date ASC ROWS BETWEEN 1 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW) - 1 AS ret
    FROM prices
),
yearly AS
(
    SELECT
        ticker,
        toYear(date)                     AS yr,
        avg(ret) * 252 * 100             AS mean_pct,
        stddevPop(ret) * sqrt(252) * 100 AS vol_pct
    FROM rets
    WHERE isFinite(ret)
    GROUP BY ticker, yr
    HAVING count() >= 200
)
SELECT
    ticker,
    round(max(mean_pct) - min(mean_pct), 1) AS mean_estimate_range_pct,
    round(max(vol_pct) - min(vol_pct), 1)   AS vol_estimate_range_pct
FROM yearly
GROUP BY ticker
ORDER BY mean_estimate_range_pct DESC

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