What It Means
Year-to-date (YTD) is the performance or return of an investment measured from the first trading day of the current calendar year up to today's date.
How It Works
YTD is a moving reference point — a stock's "YTD return" reported in March covers a very different, much shorter window than the same phrase used in November, which makes it easy to compare misleadingly across different points in the year unless you also check the actual time span involved. It's useful for a quick snapshot of how an investment has done "so far this year," but it says nothing about performance before January 1st or how the return was distributed across the months in between — a stock flat YTD could have crashed and then fully recovered, or simply gone nowhere the entire time.