What is the correct pronunciation of CAGR?
"I always hear people pronounce it to rhyme with ""bagger""." Most readers probably know that an acronym is an invented word made up   of the initial letters or syllables of other words, like NASA or NATO.   Fewer probably know that an initialism is a type of acronym that   cannot be pronounced as a word, but must be read letter-by-letter,   like FBI or UCLA. A quote from Daily Writing Tips. CAGR is an initialism, and should not be pronounced.
I am an mba and a top IT manager for many years for a medium $3B company.   What they teach you in business school is many times either theoretical or not what happens in the real world.   So, yes, many mangers think IT=costs with no returns.   My company, who used to be only $200M 10 years ago, thinks and knows the correct thing. And we are not a software company. I, too, was not a fan of ARCH or some of the other statistical items. I went through to memorize some of the method names like Durbin-Watson and knew what they corrected or what they used for. I think I had 3 of them. That was the extent of my studying for that section. IRR is the acronym for internal rate of return. And it appears that you do understand how it works.  It's not the phrase most investors use for their own returns. I'd typically talk about my own return last year, or over the last decade, etc, as well as what the S&P did during that time, and might even use the term CAGR, compound annual growth rate, although I wouldn't pronounce it 'kegger' or anything like that. Aside from discussing company investments in some MBA class, the only time I'd use IRR is in an excel spreadsheet to calculate the return over time of a series of my own investments.  The nothing magic about this, it's a function of an initial dollar investment, time passing, and the final value. All else is addition complexity based on multiple deposits/withdrawals, etc. If I deposit $100 and get back $200 in a year, it's a 100% IRR.  Disclosure - I am no fan of Investopedia or re-explaining its wording on these topics. I've caught multiple errors in their articles, and unlike the times I've emailed my friends at the IRS who quickly fix typos and mistakes I've caught, Investopedia authors are no better than bloggers (which I am) who take offense at any criticism (which I do not). No, I want you to sum up the situation for me in your own words. I want to see that you have a correct understanding of what it is you're arguing about. Until then, you're just Brad Katsuyama's shill (to use your own words). The one that I used in a technical meeting with out-of-touch career bureaucrats last year of Technical Evangelists.    The bureaucrats where thoroughly confused (thinking I was talking about people of a particular religious faith) until one of them asked for a definition.  Context, people! Well technically the Bank in Europe does not care about the Beneficiary Account Number [i.e. your Account number in Canada]. Use the format that is most commonly used in Canada. Generally if you quote with Bank/Branch identifiers it would be better. "My experience is in economics, so it may differ from an accounting or personal finance perspective somewhat; that being said, I find it perfectly acceptable to use a term like CAGR when the rate is positive or negative. Economists talk about negative growth rates all the time, and it's universally assumed that growth rates can be positive or negative.1 Ideally, the actual magnitude and sign of the value should be specified by the value itself. The term, whether it's ""growth rate"", some modified version of it like CAGR, or any label in a table or on a graph, should describe the calculation or source used obtain the value. I shouldn't need the name to indicate the sign of the number if the number is present; the name is only there to help me understand the value. Unfortunately, I don't know of any specific term that represents the geometric averaging nature of CAGR and also eliminates the minor potential for semantic confusion. However, I think the minor problem of semantics needs to be balanced against the tradeoff of using a different term that isn't as common, if one were to exist. CAGR is a standard, well-known term that a) allows someone who is familiar with the term to instantly understand the procedure you're using, and b) allow someone who isn't familiar with it to quickly search and find an explanation, since searching for CAGR will numerous simple explanations of how it's calculated. 1. This is different from the concept of economic growth, which is usually assumed to be positive in informal discussions. In economic modeling, many of the first steps in creating a model are symbolic anyway, so ""growth rate,"", ""change in output"", and ""economic growth"" are used interchangeably to describe changes in GDP because the values either aren't known, irrelevant until later in the project, or pulled from data that describes it using one or several of the previously stated terms." "**Gregory R. Page**  Gregory ""Greg"" R. Page (born 1952) is an American businessman. He serves as executive chairman of Cargill, Inc. of Minnetonka, Minnesota.  ***  ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&amp;message=Excludeme&amp;subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/business/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot)   ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.27"