This article is a guest contribution by Doug Short, of dshort.com.
In real (inflation/deflation-adjusted) terms, when did the US market permanently regain the high reached in 1929? The first chart illustrates two answers to the question. One uses the real price and the other uses the real total return.
The remaining charts compare market performance since 2000 with the equivalent elapsed time following the peak in 1929. As the final chart shows, the current real total return over the past decade is worse than the performance over the equivalent timeframe during the Great Depression.
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I've used the S&P Composite for this exercise — a splicing of the S&P 500, which was created in March 1957, and the earlier S&P 90 Stock Composite Index, a daily index that dates from January 1928. The chart is based on daily data for the price and the estimated total return calculated with daily interpolations based on quarterly dividends).
