Today let's have some fun with numbers. The kind that inves tors rely on. Which turn out to be the kind that can be skewed by their start or end dates, and that can skewer your investment portfolio if you follow them blindly. if Let's start with a key number, the five-year return for stocks. For the five years that ended in 2012, the Standard & Poor's 500 produced a return, including reinvested dividends, of a crummy 1.66% annually. That's not exactly the kind of record that would encourage you to buy stocks, is it? But 2013 turned out to be a great year for stocks. As a result, the S&P's five-year annual return through the end of last year jumped almost 1,000%-no, that's not atypo-to 17.94%.
展开▼
