Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" gives ~5% as the historical rate of return of capital after inflation, which is remarkably consistent across countries and decades.
a robo-adviser I am using "assume[s] a return of 5.1-5.45% on stocks and 0.74-1.05% on bonds after 0.5% fees". I do find these numbers a bit pessimistic but at the same time, I would expect the robo-adviser to give more optimistic numbers than pessimistic ones.
0.5% fees are high. are you getting value out of those, compared to index funds and some vanguard target funds that are 1/10th to 1/4 of the price?
they do auto-rebalancing and auto tax loss harvesting, kinda hands-free investment. Real human investors can charge 1.5%
S&P 500 return was about 22% in 2017. On paper, I made a lot, although I have no plans to touch any of it for a long time.