Actual Return

  

You dream. You envision. You hope. You believe that your fidget spinner company will return a million bucks in profit next year, four million the year after that, and ten million the year after that. You honestly expect those financial returns.

Three years go by, during which you visually age forty years, only to look back and realize that your trailing three years actual returns were breakeven year one, a loss of $200,000 year two, and a loss of a million in year three, before you finally threw in the towel and declared bankruptcy.

In wars, actual always defeats expected. Sorry.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Return on Sales (ROS)?3 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop what is return on sales or r

00:07

o s This is your return This is your return

00:11

on sale Any questions Oh i see a lot of

00:14

hands raised Ok then return on sales are roos is

00:18

an investment metric which basically reflects how profitable a company

00:23

is that is return here is profits and sales is

00:28

well the stuff you sold so return on sales is

00:30

a profitability index It speaks to how profitable and given

00:35

industry or company runs take wear hauser the paper and

00:39

pulp company that kills trees and makes them into paper

00:42

in a good year They have five billion dollars in

00:44

sales and profits of two hundred fifty million Really low

00:48

profit margin business especially when you consider that so many

00:52

years are well not good But the google search biz

00:55

well it's a bunch of servers and algorithm and not

00:58

much else So in a given year on sales of

01:00

twenty billion box it'll have returns of something like fifteen

01:04

billion pretax The basic notion is that you will see

01:08

the term return on a ton of other terms like

01:11

return on capital return on assets return on equity and

01:14

almost always the return that they're referring to There is

01:18

profits or earnings And from that ratio of return on

01:22

whatever in this case return on sales Investors can impute

01:26

a profit margin just a fraction which then derives the

01:29

valuation and or various other metrics Important toe Understanding a 00:01:33.812 --> [endTime] given security investment that's Why we study it

Up Next

Finance: What Is a Real Return?
67 Views

What is real return? Real return is the actual return made from an investment after inflation is factored in. Return is expressed as a percentage c...

Finance: What are Return on Equity and Return on Assets?
145 Views

What are Return on Equity and Return on Assets? Return on equity is a percentage that is found by dividing net income by shareholder’s equity. It...

Finance: How Do You Calculate Rates of Return?
35 Views

How do you calculate rates of return? Calculating rate of return on an investment that pays dividends can be a bit tricky. You need to look at the...

Finance: What is the Difference Between Taxable and Untaxed Returns?
2 Views

What is the difference between taxable and untaxed returns? Not all returns and investments are taxed. Some of these can be considered nontaxable i...

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)