In his book Stocks for the Long Run (McGraw-Hill, 2008), Jeremy Siegel analyzes the historical performance of several types of investments (economists call them asset classes). He tries to answer the question “How much does the stock market actually return?” After crunching lots of numbers, Siegel found that since 1926: Stocks have returned an average of about 10% per year. Over the past 80 years, stocks have produced a real return (meaning an inflation-adjusted return) of 6.8%, which also happens to be their average rate of return for the past 200 years. Bonds have returned about 5%. Adjusted
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