This index is famous for a reason. The advice you’ll hear repeated endlessly is: buy a fixed amount regularly — every day, week, or month, regardless of the current price — hold for 20–30 years, and you’ll come out ahead of almost everyone else. Of course, whether you’re even around in 20–30 years to enjoy it is a separate question — but looking backward at the historical data, it’s hard to find a stretch where this approach delivered a genuinely bad return.
Here’s the part that surprised me: this famous index’s return is actually very close to gold’s. The S&P 500’s return has been about 7.59% a year since 1972; gold’s has been about 7.21% a year over that same stretch, measured against the dollar. Our grandparents’ instinct to set aside a little gold every month wasn’t exactly wrong, historically speaking.
The practical takeaway isn’t “pick one or the other” — it’s that both have historically rewarded patient, regular buying over decades, and neither has meaningfully outrun the other by the kind of margin the “stocks always crush gold” narrative implies.
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