Retired now and out of it all.
I know people who lost almost everything staying in the high risk high return funds.
I worked for the feds so it was easy to transfer from all the funds.

It looks like you avoided a bloodbath under Bush II. Reagan and Bush I had decent returns. I don't have total return data going back before 1976. By total return, I mean including reinvested dividends.

(Democrats have better records from some tabulation I saw in Forbes a few years ago, and going back to Truman).

The below are the total returns of VFINX, Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund. The Adjusted Close column includes reinvested dividends and other distributions, so is the basis of the below.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VFINX/history

Measuring from the last close before Inauguration Day.

Total Average Annualized Returns of VFINX under Republican presidents
7.44% Benedict Dotard (1/19/17 close to 12/31/18 close)
-3.93% Bush I
14.47% Bush II
10.70% Reagan
.... Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford -- VFINX doesn't go back this far

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Some people measure Benedict Dotard's returns from the election. Measuring from election afternoon close (11/8/16) thru 12/31/18 close, the average annualized return has been 9.78%

As for 2018, the year we just suffered through, the annualized total return is MINUS 4.43%.

Measured from the Sept 20 peak, the S&P 500 itself is down 14.5% (I didn't include reinvested dividends in this particular number, because that wouldn't change that number much over a 3 month period, maybe 0.5 percentage points at most)

As the bull market that began in 2009 continues to age, and Dottie gets more erratic, and as the new Congress harasses him ...

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I'm not hawking VFINX, BTW, I use it because it is the oldest S&P 500 index fund, so the data goes back further than anyone else's (back to 8/31/76). There are other low expense ratio S&P 500 index funds out there, that might track the S&P 500 just as well or better. And S&P 500 ETFs too.

I use S&P 500 index funds because their returns include reinvested dividends (very important) and include (are net of) expenses (very important too). This is as close as one can get to investing in an index.

I have not found anything that will allow me to find the return of the S&P 500 itself, with reinvested dividends, from any date to any date of my choosing. And VFINX only goes back to 8/31/76. That's one reason why I haven't tried to figure out Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford's record.

here for some major index info

S & P 500, 90-day T-bills, 10-year Treasuries, back to 1926 (the earliest complete data on the S&P500, matched to Ibbotson.)

not yet updated for 2018, of course...that'll likely take a few days, maybe a week.

Unfortunately it is just by calendar year, so won't help when I need the return between 2 dates that aren't on year-end (or year-beginning) boundaries, but it's the best one of these I've seen of the annual calendar year returns. And I love the cumulative return column and the T-bill and T-bond data.

I had access to monthly data on all sorts of investments and indices, back to 1952. I really wish I could've saved it somehow (for my own use). That was possibly the best job I ever had, except for the fact that my boss was a hydrophobic she-wolf (but that's another story.)

If you look at it you can find all the different funds. What happened many times in the risk funds would be wide movement up and down for months one way and then months the other way. it became very uncertain and you could loose large sums very quickly and then gain back but slower. We didn't have the funds you mentioned but if you go to the site tsb.gov and follow the C fund for a year you will see over the year it is about even after ups and downs.

On the site tsb.gov go to share prices then annual returns and you will see the difference in Obama's eight years and trumps first two, big difference. Look under monthly returns for trump and you will see the risk and the certainty of the G bond fund.

I think you may enjoy the thrift savings plan site. It explains the funds and makes it easy for non financial people to understand.

Peace.

Do you mean tsp.gov?

I did Investment Funds -> Share Prices and got to here.
https://www.tsp.gov/InvestmentFunds/FundPerformance/index.html

Yes, Obama's 8 years were great, without a doubt. He started at near the very bottom of the Bush crash -- the low point of the S&P 500 was on March 9, 2009, a month and a half after Obama took office.

I talk about that in the thread in my sig line, though it is updated only through last February

http://www.democraticunderground.com/111622439#post4



Update: as of 12/31/18 close, S&P 500 under Trump (from the 1/19/17 close through the 12/31/18 close) is up 10.74% without dividends and up 14.98% with dividends reinvested, so he lost a lot of ground since 2/1/18.

As for why I keep yammering about the S&P 500, it is a capitalization weighted index of 75 to 80% of the U.S. stock market by capitalization. I'd rather use a total U.S. stock market index as my measurement of the U.S. stock market, and get 100% of the U.S. stock market, but the indexes and funds that follow them don't go back very far.

And that for whatever reason, the S&P 500 is the benchmark most often used to compare other funds to. (By contrast, the Dow 30 industrials is a price-weighted selection of 30 so-called "blue chip" stocks).

I don't happen to own an S&P 500 index fund.

I've been investing in equities and bond funds since the early 1980s, so yes, I've experienced plenty of volatility -- having suffered through the 1987, dot com, and housing bubble crashes. In none of these cases did I sell equities, and was rewarded for hanging on in a few years as the market went on to new highs.

I prefer equities because, well, the risk is very much worth the return. The VFINX S&P 500 index fund has had an average annualized return of 11.18% since its August 31, 1976 inception, per
https://www.thestreet.com/quote/VFINX.html

During that time (8/31/76 - 12/31/18), it went up 88.78 fold.

Another view of the performance of equities vs. T Bills and T Bonds is at lastlib's link:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html

I'll explore the tsp.gov site some more, thanks much for the recommendation.