Despite wars, recessions, and crises, the U.S. stock market has remained one of the most reliable engines of wealth creation and human progress. A single dollar invested in U.S. equities around 1870, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to roughly $30,000 to $35,000 in today\u2019s dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In nominal terms, long-run total returns have averaged about 9.2\u20139.3% annually<\/strong>. After accounting for inflation, U.S. equity investors have grown their purchasing power by roughly 7% per year for more than a century and a half. That equates to a real, inflation-adjusted return of approximately 6.5\u20137%<\/strong> per year over 150 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those historic returns are confirmed across multiple academic and practical sources. Jeremy Siegel\u2019s Stocks for the Long Run<\/em> estimates real equity returns of around 6.5\u20137% across two centuries. The Credit Suisse\/UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook<\/em> shows a similar pattern since 1900, and Robert Shiller\u2019s historical dataset, which tracks monthly prices, dividends, and inflation since 1871, remains the benchmark for long-term total return calculations. Complementary analysis from Aswath Damodaran (1928 to present) reaches the same conclusion: nominal equity returns near 9\u201310%, translating to 6\u20137% real after inflation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This long-term record does not mean returns are steady or predictable. Investors rarely see results close to the historical average in any single year<\/strong>, as they experience booms and busts, bull and bear markets, and long stretches of underperformance often followed by sharp recoveries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite wars, recessions, and crises, the U.S. stock market has remained one of the most reliable engines of wealth creation and human progress. A single dollar invested in U.S. equities around 1870, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to roughly $30,000 to $35,000 in today\u2019s dollars. In nominal terms, long-run total returns have averaged about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17],"tags":[39,68,89,3,13,90],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equities","category-trend","tag-compounding","tag-equity-returns","tag-history","tag-market-moves","tag-markets","tag-patterns"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karolpelc.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}