[extropy-chat] American Humanists Association 2004 conference report - complete!

[Hal Finney]

BillK writes:
> Do some googling on inflation-corrected indexes and you will find that
> the inflation-corrected S&P 500 Index shows a compound annual return of
> 1.46 percent per year over the 125 years from 1871 to 1996.
> <http://www.cpcug.org/user/invest/charts.html#InflCorr>

This neglects the impact of dividends, an important contribution to stock
market returns.  If you reinvest dividends you get much higher returns.
See http://www.cpcug.org/user/invest/toretcpi.gif.  From 1928 to 1997,
$1 invested in the S&P 500 would have grown to about $120 with dividends
reinvested.  This corresponds to an average annual return of 6.9%,
in line with Robert's estimate of 6% real returns.

> <http://www.cpcug.org/user/invest/secular.html>

This kind of chartistry is not very credible to me.  No one can reliably
predict a bear market extending through 2014, because if the prediction
were really convincing, people would take positions in advance to cancel
it out.

Hal