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
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
# Using the last closing before inauguration (G.W. Bush inaugurated noon Jan 20, 2001; Obama at noon, Jan 20, 2009; and Trump at noon, Jan 20, 2017)
# When Clinton left office and G.W. Bush took office, the S&P 500 index was at 1343.
# When G.W. Bush left office and Obama took office, the S&P 500 index was at 850.
# When Obama left office and and Trump took office, the S&P 500 index was at 2264.
# Thus under G.W. Bush, the S&P 500 index DROPPED 37%, from 1343 to 850.
. . While under Obama, the S&P 500 index rose from 850 to 2264, an INCREASE of 166% (a doubling plus an additional 66%, or 2.66 X)
# As of Thursday 2/1/18 close, the S&P 500 index is at 2822, an increase of 25% under Trump so far.
(Total returns - which includes dividends - are higher than the index gains by about 2% / year).
(I use the S&P 500 index rather than the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (DJIA) because it is a much broader index of U.S. stocks, containing about 75% of the total U.S. stock market by capitalization. I would rather use the Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index (^ DWC (without the space between the ^ and the D) but its history extends only back to 2004). Other U.S. total market indexes also extend back only a few years.
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.
= new reply since forum marked as read