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 29 of 88
An S&P 500 correction is a decline of 10% or more from a recent peak. On a $10M equity portfolio, that's a $1M drawdown on paper before you've made a single decision. According to Ned Davis Research and Hartford Funds, corrections have occurred roughly once every 1.2 years since 1928, averaging a 13
The S&P 500's revenue leaders and its market cap leaders are almost entirely different lists. Walmart generated over $640 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue yet carries a market cap roughly one-sixth the size of Apple, which produced around $380 billion in revenue. That gap is the entire story of how mo
S&P 500 compounding is the mechanism by which reinvested dividends and deferred capital gains generate returns on top of prior returns, turning a large initial position into a substantially larger one over time. The index itself does not compound. Your behavior as an investor does. That distinction
The S&P 500 Sharpe ratio measures how much return the index delivers per unit of volatility, after subtracting the risk-free rate. Over the long run, that figure averages roughly 0.40 to 0.45. It sounds modest, and it is. But it also beats the majority of actively managed funds on a risk-adjusted ba
The S&P 500 vs inflation chart tells a clear story over long horizons: equities win. Robert Shiller's dataset going back to 1871 shows a real annualized return of approximately 6.5–7% per year. But that average conceals decade-long stretches of deeply negative real returns that can permanently impai
The Russell 1000 vs S&P 500 comparison matters far less than most investors assume, and far more than they realize in specific contexts. Both indices track large-cap U.S. equities with a correlation typically above 0.99. The real distinctions show up in construction methodology, expense ratios, tax
The S&P probability of default table maps each credit rating to a historically observed likelihood of default across multiple time horizons, from one year out to fifteen. AAA-rated issuers have maintained near-zero one-year default rates historically, while CCC/C-rated issuers have exceeded 25% in s
The oldest stocks in the S&P 500 include companies founded before the American Civil War, with Colgate-Palmolive tracing its roots to 1806. Five companies stand out for both their age and their continued index membership: Colgate-Palmolive (1806), Consolidated Edison (1823), Procter & Gamble (1837),
The S&P 500 sector weights over time tell a story that most passive investors miss entirely. Energy commanded roughly 28% of the index in 1980. Today it sits below 4%. Information Technology has gone the other direction, rising from approximately 6% in 1990 to over 28% by the early 2020s, according
The S&P 500 drawdown history spans nearly a century of peak-to-trough declines, from the 86% collapse of 1929–1932 to the 33.9% COVID crash that recovered in 148 days. The pattern is consistent: drawdowns are inevitable, recoveries are not guaranteed to be fast, and how you respond determines whethe
Since its 1957 inception, the S&P 500 has compounded at roughly 10.5% annually with dividends reinvested, turning $10,000 into approximately $3.8 to $4.2 million through December 2023, depending on the total return data source. Strip out dividends and that number drops sharply. That distinction matt
The S&P 500 hitting a new all-time high generates a predictable wave of financial media noise. For investors managing $5M+ portfolios, the more useful question isn't whether to celebrate or panic. It's whether the milestone triggers any specific action on taxes, allocation, or estate planning before