Gold Prices Set To Smash Record As Wall Street Shuns The Dollar

[progree]

20. I'm talking about an S&P 500 or Total Markets index over the long term

like since 1926 or e.g. the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund since its August 31, 1976 inception 10.94% average annualized return (search for "Life of Fund" on the page) https://www.thestreet.com/quote/VFINX.html

For shorter periods, yes, sometimes worse, sometimes better. For subsets like MOAT, sometimes better, sometimes worse.

For long term results, I use S&P 500 as a proxy for the total U.S. equity market because there weren't total market indexes or funds back more than 30 years or so. But the S&P 500 represents 75% to 80% of the total U.S. equity market and in the times they've both existed, they've been almost identical - actually the total U.S. market has done a little better because smaller caps tend to do better than large caps over the long run.

Another one to look at for long term results.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html

From the start of 1928 to the end of 2019, $100 in the S&P 500 increased to $502,417 over 92 years. That's a 9.71% average annualized return.

And some 401k's come with rather large fees, which greatly harm long-term results. That's not the fault of the underlying equity investment.

I have no fees in my IRA or regular accounts, for example, and in the case of index mutual funds or ETF funds, expense ratios are well less than 0.1%/year.