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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

Cumulative return for the S&P 500 over the past 9 years (conveniently leaving out the 2008 crash), with dividend reinvestment, is equivalent to a YoY gain of 16.25%, which gets you to a million on $46,000 per year for those 9 years. However I think it would be foolish to presume that the stock market will continue to post those kind of gains forever.

Edit: adjusted ambiguous wording about S&P gains

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> Cumulative return for the S&P 500 over the past 9 years (conveniently leaving out the 2008 crash), with dividend reinvestment, is equivalent to a YoY gain of 16.25%

That's a bit disingenuous to use the generational market lows of 2009 as your starting point. It would be like using the all-time highs of 2000 and the 2009 lows as your range. Then the cumulative returns would be negative ( including dividends ).

> However I think it would be foolish to presume that the stock market will continue to post those kind of gains forever.

It's impossible for any economy/market/whatever to maintain a 16% return every year.

> That's a bit disingenuous to use the generational market lows of 2009 as your starting point. It would be like using the all-time highs of 2000 and the 2009 lows as your range. Then the cumulative returns would be negative ( including dividends ).

Right, I did that on purpose, just as a way of showing that luck (in terms of accidental market timing) has a huge impact on returns. As I said in top comment, even 8% is not sustainable, let alone 16.

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