Whether or not you are a big investor, most Americans know that a glance at the stock market is usually a dependable gauge of the financial temperature of the country. Even now, as COVID-19 affects daily life, the performance of the stock market has provided some indication of how the public is reacting to the pandemic. There was a momentary jump in gains when Congress considered passing aid packages in early March, but steep drops followed, as more of the country shut down for the health and well-being of its citizens.
Stacker compiled historical total annual returns, including both price appreciation and dividends, from 1920 to 2020. Stock returns data from 1928 to 2020 is from YCharts and New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran. The 1920 to 1927 stock returns are based on Robert Shiller’s Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Composite total returns, originally published in his 1989 book “Market Volatility,” which has been revised and updated. In 1957, the S&P transitioned its major index into an examination of 500 select companies, creating the well-known S&P 500 index. The index tracks companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market, using a market capitalization weighting methodology—giving more weight to larger companies—as compared to the price-weighted approach employed by the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Annual returns for three-month U.S. Treasury bills—short-term bonds that…
