We’ve seen that stock market investors have been rewarded for investing regularly during the last decade. $10,000 invested in the Vanguard Target Retirement 2045 fund in January 2010 would have grown to $25,000 in January 2020. $10,000 invested in the Vanguard S&P 500 Index fund would have grown to $35,000 from 2010-2020!

However, the FactorResearch article Global Pension Funds: The Coming Storm summarizes why we should have more reasonable expectations for the next decade. First up, we have low interest rates. If you have low interest rates now, then your future bond returns are highly likely to be similarly low.

For stocks, we have a historically low earnings yield (or historically high P/E ratio). While the correlation is not as high, a low earnings yield usually leads to low future equity returns:

Based on this combination of low starting interest rates and low starting earnings yield, the author’s model predicts an annualized average return of 3.1% nominal for a traditional 60% stocks/40% bonds portfolio over the next 10 years.

(Time to set a reminder for 1/1/2030!)

These predictions can be dangerous in terms of market timing. Low interest rates and relatively high valuations were also true a year ago, but then the US stock market went up another 30%! If you avoided stocks, you would have missed a huge gain only to find yourself with even lower forward return expectations. Returns are lumpy – there might be only a few big positive years and many negative years to average out to a 5% return. What if you just missed one of the huge positive years?

My only takeaway is to maintain both stock market exposure and reasonable expectations. Various factors combined to make 2019 a big year for stocks (and most other major asset classes) and I’ll certainly take it, but also remember that it won’t be like that every year. There is a quote that happiness = reality minus expectations. For investing, maybe it changes to: likeliness of panic selling = reality minus expectations.

I used to add up my net worth every month (if not more frequently), but nowadays I limit myself to quarterly portfolio checks to coincide roughly with when my dividends arrive. There is so much daily noise about stock market prices these days that I’ve found it much more relaxing this way. However, I do enjoy a brief reflection at the end of the year. Here are the annual returns for select asset classes as benchmarked by ETFs per Morningstar after market close 12/31/19.

Commentary. As of 2017 year-end, the performance of every asset class was positive. The lowest positive return was from short-term US Treasuries. As of 2018 year-end, the performance of nearly every asset class was negative. The highest return was from short-term US Treasuries.

As of 2019 year-end, we find ourselves again in a situation where the return of nearly every major asset class was positive. And yet again, the lowest positive return was from short-term US Treasuries. Short-term Treasury bonds are slow, steady, and safe… but you also need to be in the risky asset game to reap the rewards when things are hot.

The Vanguard Target Retirement 2045 fund (roughly 90% diversified stocks and 10% bonds) was up 21.4% in 2017, down 7.9% in 2018, and up 24.9% in 2019. The benchmark for our personal portfolio, a more conservative mix of 70% stocks/30% bonds as we are close to living off it, was up 17.1% in 2017, down 5.9% in 2018, and up 21.2% in 2019.

The more stocks keep going up, the more we are reminded that eventually they will go down again. There remains a lot of anxiety about a recession looming around the corner. A famous quote (perhaps by Gary Shilling?) states that “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” This is usually brought up during stock market crashes, but also applies during bull markets. Yes, stocks will have another bad streak eventually, and future 10-year returns do look rather tepid, but you can also miss out on big gains while sitting on the sidelines waiting for that to happen.

I won’t lie – I am pleasantly surprised at my brokerage statement this year, but I’m also wary about future returns. What keeps me owning a big chunk of stocks is that I am confident that the hundreds of business that I own through these ETFs and mutual funds will collectively make a profit, reinvest some of it to keep growing, and distribute some of it to me in the form of cash dividends. I am also confident that my US government bonds, municipal bonds, and FDIC/NCUA-insured bank certificates will keep the panic if a market drop does come.

As this decade comes to an end, I find it noteworthy that Large-Cap Growth stocks have outperformed Large-Cap Value stocks during most of the the 2010s. When I first started learning about investing in the previous decade of the 2000s, much was made of how Large-Cap Value stocks historically outperformed Growth. You can see this cyclical behavior below, taken from this Morningstar article:

Similar to economic cycles, growth and value stocks have alternated leadership roles based on past performance, as shown here over the rolling three-year periods starting 1973. While value beat growth during the 2000s, the trend reversed in the 2010s as growth outperformed value and continues to post large gains year-to-date 2019. Nonetheless, it’s challenging to predict whether the growth’s premium over value will persist, given the irregularity of the cycles.

Nowadays, when I read about some factor that provides a superior long-term average return, I often wonder if its simply that a hot streak of recent outperformance has tilted it towards one side over another. What if it’s just part of a long cycle that eventually goes the other way? It was only after 2009 that long-term bonds and gold came back as desirable asset classes. Before that, it was commodities. Of course, there are all the ways that stocks are split up – US/International, Large/Small, Value/Growth, Momentum, Volatility, and so on.

From a previous post US vs. International Stocks: Historical Cycles of Outperformance:

Bottom line. Large Value stocks did great during the 2000s, but Large Growth stocks dominated the 2010s. Have some healthy skepticism regarding “hot” asset classes, as the trend may not last and indeed may turn around just as you make the switch.

StarCapital Research has shared a series of interesting long-term charts comparing the long-term returns, drawdowns, and volatility of stocks, bonds, and gold over the last 220 years. There are also some stats on relative market valuations and forward return expectation for different countries and regions. You must accept some terms before viewing, but it is available to US individual investors.

Here is a sample chart of the return distributions of stocks, bonds, and gold since 1800, depending on holding period, along with their takeaway, via Norbert Keimling @CAPE_invest:

Conclusion: For periods of 10 years or more, stocks are safer than bonds or gold!

This is because for a 10-year holding, the worst inflation-adjusted performance of stocks (-5.9% annually) was better than the worst performance for bonds (-6.4%) and gold (-10.1%). The problem is that during a specific 10-year timeframe where stocks did that poorly, it’s quite likely that bonds or gold did great! Which means that it would still be quite difficult to keep holding stocks through such a period of poor performance. In a fearful environment, “sell stocks and wait things out” will start sounding like much wiser advice than “buy and hold”.

Of course, stocks can recover quite quickly and you might miss it while you’re waiting:

(There is also an ongoing debate about the validity of “time diversification”. Do stocks really become “safer” the longer you hold them? They can still go down 50% at any given time, so if you need to sell in the near future, they are never really safe.)

After doing this for a while, I don’t know if someone can simply read a book and “learn” how to keep the faith during the scary bits. It takes some time and making some mistakes to develop a portfolio where you understand its limitations and how long and how badly it can act in the short-term. I’m still learning.

The big news while I was on vacation was that Schwab bought TD Ameritrade for $26 billion in an all-stock transaction (press release). Well, first Schwab shaved off 17% of TD Ameritrade’s value by cutting their trade commissions to zero, and then they bought AMTD at a multi-billion dollar discount to what it would have cost just a month earlier. Nice move.

Now that trade costs have gone to zero, and index fund expense ratios are also pretty much zero, what’s left? Vanguard funds now have a greater market share of all funds and ETFs than that of its next three biggest competitors combined, per this Marketwatch article:

That doesn’t include Schwab funds, which aren’t even on the chart.

Vanguard dominates because it has a long record of passing on virtually all of the benefits of scale to their clients. As they gathered more assets, they lowered their expense ratios, which helped them to better returns, which helped them gather more assets, and so on. Index funds may be a commodity now, but more people buy them from Vanguard than any else by far.

Vanguard is now moving into the portfolio advising turf formerly dominated by Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade. The only way Schwab and TD Ameritrade can compete is through scale and creating a better total package for both advisors and retail customers. Can customer service and technology make enough difference that people will hold their funds and ETFs at Schwab?