Absolute Percentage Growth

1.21 jigawatts hit you in your Delorean, and you go back to 1998. Your stock has an absolute percentage growth of 98, meaning that it almost doubled during the year. You're feeling a bit genius-y because you were so smart to buy eBay on New Year's Eve at the beginning of the year, but you looked at the overall NASDAQ performance and realized that NASDAQ went up (give or take) 80% that year. So your relative out-performance against the market was that you beat it by 18%. Good work, but nothing that will find its way into the sequel, The Aeneid Part 2: The Revenge. Absolute percentage growth is a vastly different animal from relative percentage growth, especially in the investing universe, where the quality of most investments are mapped to a benchmark index like the S&P 500. Up is good. Almost absolutely, except when you could've been more up somewhere else.