The S&P 500’s Real Capital Gain

The S&P 500 reached a cyclical high on February 9, 1966 at 94.06. With today’s close of 876.77, that’s a gain of 832.14%.
Let’s look at inflation since then. We won’t get the October inflation report for a few more weeks, but from January 1966 through September 2008, the CPI is up 588.00%.
That works out to a real capital gain of 35.49% stretched over 42.7 years. That’s an annualized gain of 0.71%.
Obviously I’m playing with data a little bit since I’m measuring from a cyclical high to a cyclical trough. But it’s interesting that nearly your entire gain since then has been due to dividends.

Posted by on October 24th, 2008 at 9:10 pm


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