Luck of the Market

Originally posted January 4, 2011

Here's an article in NY times about the luck of investing.  The graph can take a while to soak in so you will need to stare at it for a while.

In Investing, It's When You Start And When You Finish

After looking at this, I decided to create the same graphics for bonds.  I found data T-Bond returns for 1928-2006.  From looking at the more recent years, they correspond closely to Intermedate Treasuries so I filled in the missing years with VFIUX's returns.

TBonds_Real_Return_In_Out.html

Updated January 7, 2011

Updated chart link:

http://personalbizfinance.com/pbf/data/real_return_start_end.pl

It's now a dynamic script where you can choose allocations between 4 categories (stock, bond, money market, gold). I don't validate the percentages since most users should be able to do the math. The open TITLE tag is fixed for Chrome and added NOWRAP for Safari.

You can also download the source code at:

http://personalbizfinance.com/pbf/data/real_return_start_end.zip


(Filed in , )


1 TrackBack

Historic Portfolio Performance from Business is Personal (Finance) on January 13, 2011 8:33 AM

A few days ago, I mentioned my online tool to inspect historic returns.  The inspiration for the tool was a NY Times article -- however it's chart only showed stock returns while my tool allows you to choose any combination... Read More

Leave a comment