How Often Is The Stock Market Positive?

I advocate for long-term investing. This means that the stock market may fluctuate in the short term, but over long periods of time, it has been remarkably resilient.

But how resilient?

Above is a chart I created using data going back to WW2. The idea is that for every time period (1 year, 5 years, 10, 20), you move forward one month and then look back over that time period, say 1 year, and record your return.

Then you move forward one month again, look back, record that return, and so on and so forth.

As you can see by the grey lines, the one-year returns, you are often experiencing negative returns within a single year. BUT, over long periods of time, 10-20 years, you are rarely in negative territory.

Notice the green line representing 20 years - not once has the 20-year return been negative over that time period.

Just because this occurred in the past does not mean it will continue in the future, but it has been remarkably consistent.

I used Robert Shiller's publically accessible stock data, which can be found here.

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