I recently read a paper from Jeremy Siegel and Jeremy Schwartz titled “The Long-term Returns on the Original S&P 500 Firms�.

In this paper the authors calculate the total returns of a buy and hold of the original 500 companies in 1957. They found that on average 20 stocks annually have been added and deleted from the index (without considering that a merger of two S&P 500 companies is an addition to the index) since 1957. The authors also used three methods of calculating the returns:

 

Submitted: Jul 22, 2008    Views: 183    Comments: 2    Likes: 1   


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So which of the three portfolios performed the best? I've heard that spin-offs tend to perform well so selling them as specified in the Survivors Portfolio doesn't match that piece of advice.

Posted: Jul 22, 2008

Author/Submitter Response:

Sam,

The answer is in the article that I posted.

Arnold
(Unregistered)

Typical buy and hold. But if you buy at the wrong time you could be out of luck. Think Nasdaq in 2001. Even if you bought the top 20 companies you'd still be deep in the red.

Posted: Jul 22, 2008

Author/Submitter Response:

Yes, but Nasdaq in 2000 was more of a tech sector index, whereas S&P 500 is a more diversified index.



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