purchased at the beginning of the year for $100. The quarterly dividend is reinvested at the quarter-end stock price. The number of shares purchased each quarter = ($ Dividend)/($ Stock Price). The final investment value of $103.02 compared with the initial investment of $100 means the return is $3.02 or 3.02%. The continuously compounded rate of return in this example is: . To calculate the capital gain for US income tax purposes, include the reinvested dividends in the cost basis. The investor received a total of $4.06 in dividends over the year, all of which were reinvested, so the cost basis increased by $4.06. Cost Basis = $100 + $4.06 = $104.06 Capital gain/loss = $103.02 − $104.06 = -$1.04 (a capital loss) For U.S. income tax purposes therefore, dividends were $4.06, the cost basis of the investment was $104.06 and if the shares were sold at the end of the year, the sale value would be $103.02, and the capital loss would be $1.04. Mutual fund and investment company returns Mutual funds, unit investment trusts or UITs, insurance separate accounts and related variable products such as variable universal life insurance policies and variable annuity contracts, and bank-sponsored commingled funds, collective benefit funds or common trust funds, all derive their value from an underlying investment portfolio. Investors and other parties are interested to know how the investment has performed over various periods of time. Performance is usually quantified by a fund's total return. In the 1990s, many different fund companies were advertising various total returns—some cumulative, some averaged, some with or without deduction of sales loads or commissions, etc. To level the playing field and help investors compare performance returns of one fund to another, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began requiring funds to compute and report total returns based upon a standardized formula—so-called "SEC Standardized total return", which is the average annual total return assuming reinvestment of dividends and distributions and deduction of sales loads or charges. Funds may compute and advertise returns on other bases (so-called "non-standardized" returns), so long as they also publish no less prominently the "standardized" return data. Subsequent to this, apparently investors who had sold their fund shares after a large increase in the share price in the late 1990s and early 2000s were ignorant of how significant the impact of income/capital gain taxes was on their fund "gross" returns. That is,