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I wish they'd say what "Stocks" means. Is it the entire market? On which exchanges?

This is a relevant read: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/survivorshipbias.asp

The very leftmost column of the table has the heading 'S&P 500 (includes dividends)', so I assume that's the meaning of 'stocks' in the other columns. If not, that would be very misleading.

I think it's worth noting that S&P 500 index funds didn't exist until the 70s. You'd be spending a lot of time and money to approximate it before that.

The S&P 500 just tracks the largest 500 publicly traded companies. So no, it's not difficult to approximate.

You need to pay commission and spread every time you rebalance your portfolio (daily, if you copy the frequency of modern funds)

So at the £5ish/trade of my current broker, that's a cool £912500/year on just commission.

For some reason the massively reduced ease of entry to a trading strategy like this is never considered when lauding its historical performance.

> daily, if you copy the frequency of modern funds

Modern S&P500 funds like SPY or VOO rebalance quarterly FYI

Yeah I'd like to see too if you were Russian, Japanese or Argentinian for example what the returns would have been. I doubt the stock market would have been so kind.

No matter where you live you can usually diversify to global stocks.

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