(PRO/ELITE) When Size Matters: A Quantitative Lens on Return Magnitudes and Market Impact

In financial markets, it's often assumed that most returns come from a steady accumulation of small daily moves. But what if the largest absolute return days – both positive and negative – dominate the overall trajectory? To investigate this, we sorted daily returns for six key assets over the first part of 2025 and compared them with the same period in 2024. Instead of viewing returns chronologically, we ordered them by absolute magnitude, then examined their compounded contribution to total return.

Below, we break down each asset’s behavior—revealing which markets are driven by slow compounding and which depend on just a handful of volatile days.