What is industry standard: stating equity returns as real or nominal?

Is it industry standard to state the return on equities in real or nominal terms?

Does this vary by the context of where the information is presented or the asset type? For example returns stated in a fund prospectus vs. a WSJ article discussing a particular stock.

Should I be looking for an asterisk in literature to understand if stated returns or real or nominal?

6 Comments
 

No, it’s just that you almost always do it in nominal terms. Exception might be fixed income stuff.

Why overcomplicate things beyond what they are already? Last thing you need is another debatable assumption in your valuation.

Next thing you know we’ll be doing daily DCF’s instead of quarterly/annuals to ensure that we get the true intrinsic value of a firm at this present second.

 

companies make money and grow in nominal dollars. Inflation is an output of economy wide corporate decisions (+housing and other things of course) so you'd run into circular reasoning if you adjusted down everyone's growth by inflation (itself largely a weighted average of corporate decisions). Plus you calculate gain/loss and taxes on nominal values and purchase prices

 
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