Unexpectedly Intriguing!
17 April 2007

With today's release of the latest Consumer Price Index data, we finally have all the information we need to update our signature investing-related tool The S&P 500 at Your Fingertips! The tool now spans from January 1871 through March 2007 and incorporates all the available dividend, earnings and inflation data available for this time span.

Running the numbers, we find that the year-over-year gain in the S&P 500 from March 2006 to March 2007 provided a non-inflation adjusted return of 8.75% without the reinvestment of dividends and 10.73% with full dividend reinvestment. The tool does not consider the effects of taxes or commissions and fees in its calculations, which vary from year to year and broker to broker.

If you factor the 2.78% gain in reported inflation over that time period, the real rates of return for the S&P 500 are 5.97% without reinvesting dividends and 7.95% with reinvested dividends.

And if we just run the tool's newly updated default settings, from January 1871 to March 2007, we find that the S&P 500 has provided nominal returns of 4.32% without dividend reinvestment and 9.15% with dividend reinvestment. Considering the very long term rate of inflation of 2.08% from January 1871 through March 2007, the real rates of return for the S&P 500 are 2.24% without reinvesting dividends and 7.07% with full reinvestment of dividends!

One last note: the dividend and earnings data taken from Standard & Poor reflects their estimates of these figures for this latest period, which means they may be subject to revision in the future. We'll update the tool along with S&P's data as they do each quarter.

Labels: , ,

About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

ironman at politicalcalculations

Thanks in advance!

Recent Posts

Indices, Futures, and Bonds

Closing values for previous trading day.

Most Popular Posts
Quick Index

Site Data

This site is primarily powered by:

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

CSS Validation

Valid CSS!

RSS Site Feed

AddThis Feed Button

JavaScript

The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.

Other Cool Resources

Blog Roll

Market Links

Useful Election Data
Charities We Support
Shopping Guides
Recommended Reading
Recently Shopped

Seeking Alpha Certified

Archives