96 years of S&P 500 returns
In the chart above, the amazing team at Macrobond Financial has broken down the S&P 500‘s annual returns into 10 percentage point ranges.
They are color-coded each year, starting with 2024 as the darkest blue, and gradually fading over time to give a sense of how recent years compare to the historical distribution.
Actually, there was only one real outlier in this millennium: 2008. That year is still remembered by most of us...
And as you can see, many of the historical outliers occurred during the Great Depression (punishing declines and a few massive rallies).
At the beginning of the year, 2024 is obviously pretty much in the middle and we can well imagine that the current category could also fit at the end of the year...
2024 should be a year of active management.