Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
It really depends on what you invested in though; it has nothing to do with whether you invested in a mutual fund either. Look at companies like Berkshire Hathaway which are worth roughly 3x what they were in the year 2000, or Coke or Exxon or Johnson and Johnson or countless others that have give both dividends (if you're into them), as well as capital growth. In Canada you could've picked basically any bank, either railroad and at this point you have even tripled your money with businesses like Manulife which was beaten down hard in the financial crisis.
For most people tripling their money in a little more than a decade is really good. Sure, there are other less than favorable examples out there, but its not like I'm finding you some unknown business here either; those are all large, well known companies that have grown fairly steadily through the last 12-13 years.
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Yes, you can provide anecdotal evidence of companies that have tripled in the last 13 years, large stable companies to be sure. On average, large stable companies are represented by the indexes, which are up very little in percentage terms in that time period. Most people do about as well or poorly as the indexes, pretty much by definition, since they're composed of the entire stock market.
Of course, if we prefer anecdotal evidence of large stable companies, I could offer:
Pfizer: Peaked in 2000 at $48, current price of $27.62
General Electric: Peaked in 2000 at $56, current price of 23.74
Sun Life Financial: Peaked in 2000 at $40, current price of 28.91
I would very much doubt that there's any subset of investors who have tripled their money in the last ten years, and saying it like that sounds much more impressive than a compound annual return of 11.7%.