30 Years of S&P 500 Returns Look Nothing Like "The Average"
The stock market's long-run average return is a real number. It is also almost never the number you actually get in any given year. Here's every year from 1995 to 2024 — up years in green, down years in red — plus what happens to your return if you try to dodge the bad years and accidentally miss the good ones too.
Green bars are positive years, red bars are negative years. The two dashed lines are flat planning assumptions, not what any single year actually delivered.
The Data
Every bar above is a real, actual S&P 500 total return (price change plus dividends), 1995 through 2024 — the most recent 30 years in Beagle's own historical dataset (Damodaran/NYU, Shiller, and BLS), the same data behind Beagle's Historical Simulation feature. Nothing here is smoothed, averaged, or simulated.
24 Up Years, 6 Down Years — and Only 2 Landed Near "the Average"
Compound all 30 years together and you get a 10.92% annualized return — close enough to the "10%" figure you'll hear quoted everywhere, and to Beagle's own 10.5% long-run stock assumption. But that number describes the whole 30-year period, not any single year inside it. Look year by year and only 2 of the 30 landed within a couple points of 10%. Only 1 came close to a more conservative 7%. The other 27 years were either way better or way worse — including a +37.6% year (1995) and a -37.0% year (2008), nearly 75 points apart, thirteen years apart.
The average is a real, useful long-run planning number. It is a terrible predictor of what any individual year will actually do to your portfolio — which is exactly why Beagle's Historical Simulation and Monte Carlo tools run your plan against real yearly sequences instead of one flat assumption line.
If Returns Are This Unpredictable, Why Not Just Dodge the Bad Days?
Because the market's best days and worst days tend to cluster together, in the same volatile stretches — the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the March 2020 crash. Selling after a bad day to "wait for calm" routinely means sitting out the sharp rebound that follows a few days later. Missing even a handful of the best trading days over a long investing horizon does far more damage than the stat sounds like it should.
Fully invested vs. missing the market's best trading days. Dollar figures are computed from published 20-year annualized rates (see sources below).
Missing 10 Days Out of 5,000 Cost More Than Half the Return
Over a 20-year span with roughly 5,000 trading days, staying fully invested in the S&P 500 turned $10,000 into about $73,700 (10.5% annualized). Miss just the 10 single best days — out of five thousand — and that same $10,000 only grows to about $33,300 (6.2% annualized). Miss the 20 best days and you're at $20,300. Miss 30, and you've earned 1.4% a year, less than inflation over the same period.
Nobody rings a bell on the best days. They show up unannounced, usually right after — or right before — the worst ones. The only strategy that reliably captures them is staying invested through the days that feel the worst.
The missed-days numbers and the 30 years of returns above, narrated in under two minutes.
How This Works in Beagle
Beagle's default projection uses a single blended return assumption — a fast estimate, not a stress test. Historical Simulation replays your actual scenario starting from any real year in the dataset above, including 2000, 2008, and 2022. Monte Carlo runs your scenario across 1,000 randomized market paths and reports the percentage that survive, instead of one smooth average-return line.
Plan for the range, not the average
Run your own scenario against real historical years or 1,000 Monte Carlo paths, and see what your plan survives instead of a single flat return line.
Sources and limitations: Annual S&P 500 total returns (dividends reinvested), 1995–2024, are from the Damodaran (NYU) dataset — the same data used by Beagle's Historical Simulation feature. The "missing the best days" figures (fully invested 10.5%, missing 10 best days 6.2%, 20 days 3.6%, 30 days 1.4%, all annualized) are a widely-published statistic from JPMorgan Asset Management's "Guide to the Markets," based on S&P 500 daily returns over the 20 years through 2024; dollar figures here are computed from those published annualized rates for a $10,000 starting investment. All figures are nominal, pre-tax, and exclude fees. Past returns do not predict future returns. None of this is financial advice.