Knowledge Base
Tax strategy, healthcare before Medicare, the post-FIRE identity shift, and the financial decisions that get more complicated after you stop earning.
1054 articles — page 23 of 88
The Nikkei 225 vs S&P 500 comparison comes down to more than geography. One is a price-weighted index of 225 Japanese blue-chips, the other a float-adjusted market-cap index of 500 US companies. Their construction methods, return histories, and risk profiles diverge sharply enough that treating them
The S&P 500 minus Magnificent 7 returned low single digits in 2023. The full index returned over 26%. That gap is not a rounding error or a statistical quirk. It is the single most important thing to understand about U.S. equity markets right now, and the standard advice you will find in most financ
MicroStrategy and the S&P 500 remain separate entities. The company, which rebranded as "Strategy" in early 2025, does not currently meet the S&P 500's profitability requirements due to the accounting treatment of its Bitcoin holdings. That single fact has more portfolio implications than most cover
The S&P 500 EPS is the aggregate earnings per share figure for the 500 largest U.S. public companies, weighted by market capitalization. For 2023, S&P Dow Jones Indices reported a GAAP figure of approximately $197 per share against an operating figure of roughly $220. That 12% gap is not a rounding
Strip Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla out of the S&P 500 and the 2023 headline number collapses. The full index returned 26.3% that year. The remaining 493 stocks returned roughly 8 to 10%. That gap is the whole story, and it has direct implications for how you think abou
The S&P BDC Index tracks the total return performance of publicly traded Business Development Companies listed on U.S. exchanges. It uses a rules-based, market-capitalization-weighted methodology with minimum size and liquidity thresholds for eligibility. For investors allocating to middle-market cr
The S&P 500 has delivered roughly 10% annualized nominal returns since the modern 500-stock index launched in March 1957, and closer to 7% in real terms after inflation. Those numbers are real. They are also, at current valuations, unlikely to repeat over the next decade. If you are building a withd
From August 1971 through end of 2023, the S&P 500 compounded at roughly 10.7–11.0% annually (total return, dividends reinvested) versus gold's approximately 7.7–8.0% nominal CAGR. On a $1 million starting investment, that gap compounds to approximately $180 million for equities versus $65 million fo
The S&P 500 without Magnificent 7 stocks is, functionally, a different index. As of mid-2024, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla collectively represented approximately 30 to 33% of the total S&P 500 market capitalization, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices data. That concent
S&P Global subsidiaries span five core divisions: Ratings, Market Intelligence, Commodity Insights, Mobility, and Indices. Together they generated over $12 billion in combined annual revenue following the 2022 IHS Markit merger. If you hold bonds, track equity benchmarks, or allocate to commodities,
The S&P 500 EV/EBITDA ratio measures the aggregate enterprise value of index constituents relative to their combined earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. According to data tracked by S&P Global Market Intelligence, the ratio has historically ranged between 11x and 14x acr
The S&P 500 seasonality chart maps average monthly and quarterly returns across decades of data, revealing persistent calendar-based patterns in equity performance. September averages a loss. November through April consistently outperforms May through October. These are not folklore. They are statis