Expensive equities are a hot topic these days. Jack Bogle warned of lower expected equity returns recently (only 4% nominal!) and the CAPE has finally crossed 30 this month, according to Prof. Shiller. What does that mean for investors? What does it mean for early retirees? There has been a flurry of activity in the FIRE blogging world on this topic with posts by Physician on FIRE, JL Collins, Think Save Retire, and two consecutive ChooseFI Monday podcasts with JL Collins and with yours truly just two days ago discussing this topic, too.
I don’t think anyone has recommended selling equities and running for the hills. I certainly haven’t, and I am probably one of the more pessimistic FIRE bloggers. Please don’t buy gold coins! Personally, I would never bet against the U.S. stock market. If you had invested $1.00 in large-cap equities in 1871, your investment would have grown to over $13,000 by July 2017, even adjusting for inflation. In nominal terms, to more than $260,000! How amazing is that?
So the good news is: Stocks have the tendency to go up, on average. The broad index not just recovered from every possible disaster we have ever encountered (2 world wars, the Great Depression, several financial crises, the Dot Com bust, 9/11, etc.) but rallied to reach one all-time high after the other. After every cycle of fear, we see a quick recovery back to economic fundamentals. But buried in the equity return chart above is one small piece of bad news; the flipside of the market bouncing back from disasters and returning to the trend is that stocks also underperform after long periods of above-average performance. And this is where Jack Bogle is coming from. He doesn’t forecast a new bear market – nobody can – but simply predicts a decade of underwhelming returns after the strong bull market over the last 8 years. How do you even make a forecast like that? That’s the topic for today’s post…
Continue reading “U.S. Equity Returns: History and Big ERN’s 10-Year Forecast”