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Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

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Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't follow how my portfolio is doing, knowing doesn't give me much actual information and can often encourage bad behavior (admittedly I don't have many investments compared to many).

My philosophy is essentially buy low, hold forever. I don't put money that I might realistically need in the market

I mean… that defeats the point, no? Surely you must plan to use the money at some point, even if that is just enjoying the end of your days. That's still a time horizon.

> I don't put money that I might realistically need in the market

While it's great that you might have a time horizon far, far into the future, not everyone has that luxury. In theory, I'm supposed to purchase a home & start a family around this point in my life, so that's a rather quick time horizon for at least some portion of my wealth.

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#82

If the goal is to demonstrate relative performance over time, wouldn't it be useful to use a normalization such that all lines either start at the same point (e.g. simulating investing X amount) or ending at the same point (showing requirement to get to X final amount)?

I think that's a reasonable idea and I may try including that option in the future. Right now, the start point is quite arbitrary: it's the first date where we have data for all the symbols requested. And date ranges dramatically affect any sort of relative performance comparison. So in the current code I decided to just normalize to today's nominal-dollar value so that the end values are relatable. What would the id…

Just index it all to the same starting value, which will have the same effect. I don't think this works for the drawdown chart but works for the total return chart.

Usually in economic and financial reporting you show multiple return series by saying, for example, 1989 = 100 and then showing the total return from there for multiple series in the same chart.

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#83
post #79

Perhaps Gold should be on the front page, as it is always mentioned as a supposed inflation hedge. also https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all... has stock data back to 1971, it would be nice to go back that far.

While it's not a security and summarizing its returns is more complex, it would also be interesting to see "home ownership."

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#84
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that just furthers the point- there isn't enough 'money' in M2 to 'pay' for all the stocks in the stock market. Yet there that value sits and real estate is another 20+ trillion in land value. In other words the actual 'money' is a transactional grease for the wheels of commerce- notational/bookkeeping mechanism. The sale of Apple (the largest value stock in America) as a whole probably couldn't be accomplish…

A change in preferences from holding dollar reserves to holding stocks could change the value of the USD, that's what I am saying.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#85

Wish it had the 70s, or ideally, the whole 20th century. The 80s-2010s has been a period of unusually low inflation and consistent market returns, buoyed by the end of the Cold War and entry of the developing world into the world economy. There's a good chance that we revert to the mean going forwards and see much more geopolitical instability and resource constraints.

So, what does a young person do these days?

First few years out of college were just "max out 401k contributions into some target fund" + build emergency fund, but now that I've amassed more cash than what an emergency fund requires, what does one do?

Originally, my plan was to use it for a house down-payment, but with the mortgage rates having nearly doubled in the last 6 months, that's kind of out of the question at this point (especially having moved to a higher property value area to be closer to friends and family).

Everything I've seen in the news for last few months just seems to say "sorry, the last 50 years was a gravy train, it'll never work that way again, you're screwed".

Both my parents' and grandparents' entire careers existed (or to this point existed) during the "good times", so I'm honestly feeling like I can't just take their advice directly.

Part of me wants to leave my present (tech) job and move to a FAANG type company (for the pay increase), but with all the uncertainty on the horizon, are the big tech companies going to maintain their current headcount or salaries if another '08 style recession (or worse) hits? How stable are their revenues if people start spending way less money on things?

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#86
post #79

Perhaps Gold should be on the front page, as it is always mentioned as a supposed inflation hedge. also https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all... has stock data back to 1971, it would be nice to go back that far.

Here's an example link: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...

If you scroll down, under the "Portfolio Growth" chart, you can check "inflation adjusted" to get a common start, something TFA doesn't have.

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#88
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Portfolio emphasizing U.S. and foreign large- and mid-capitalization value stocks. VFINX is not composed exclusively of US stocks.

It’s an S&P500 fund; that is composed (exclusively) of large cap US stocks.

Not according to Vanguard[0] (the link is for VFIAX but that's just the admiral fund), the quote I gave was from Vanguard's own description of the fund's composition.

You can take it up with Vanguard why they describe the fund as I've quoted[1].

[0] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

[1] https://support.vanguard.com/

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#89
post #79

Perhaps Gold should be on the front page, as it is always mentioned as a supposed inflation hedge. also https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all... has stock data back to 1971, it would be nice to go back that far.

While it's not a security and summarizing its returns is more complex, it would also be interesting to see "home ownership."

Wondering whether the Case-Shiller index would be good for this. The problem with RE is broad heterogeneity.

Re: Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns

#90

Visually it's a really nice looking site. If I may offer one suggestion, it would be to use a minus sign (unicode U+2212) for the negative numbers - by default, for historical pre-unicode reasons, computers tend to use a hyphen instead and it just doesn't look as good, at least to my eye!

Thank you, TIL!
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