• Stat #1 – McRib Effect:
  • Nick Maggiulli’s Original Article and Research (2018)
  • Updated Research (2023)
  • Can the Return of the McRib Really Boost Stocks?
• Stat #2 – Fartcoin:
  • What Is Fartcoin and Why Is It Trending?
  • Real-Time Fartcoin Market Cap
  • Fartcoin Market Cap Greater Than 38% of All U.S. Publicly Traded Companies
• Stat #3 – Shiller P/E Ratio
  • What is the CAPE Shiller P/E
  • Benjamin Felix Research (1871 – 2024)
• Stat #4 – Back-to-Back Returns
  • Ben Carlson’s Historical Research
• Stat #5 – Netflix Stock
  • Three 75%+ Drawdowns Leading to New All-Time Highs
  • If You Invested $1,000 in Netflix’s IPO, This Is How Much Money You’d Have Now
  • Break-Even Math
• Stat #6 – Berkshire Hathaway
  • Berkshire vs. S&P 500 Since 1965
• Stat #7 – Underperformance Leading to Higher Returns
  • 1960-1980 (5% Outperformance) vs 1980-2000 (5% Underperformance)
• Stat # 8 – Active Management Isn’t Dead
  • Actively Managed Funds AUM Up 40%
  • Active Management is Far From Dead
  • Stewart Brown’s Paper on Fund Fees
• Stat #9 – Russell 3,000 Stock Performance
  • Ben Carlson’s Research 1999 vs. 2024
• Stat #10 – Japan’s Stock Market
  • Japan’s Long Comeback
  • Japan’s Nikkei Stock Hits New All-Time High (34 Years Later)
• Stat #11 – Starbucks
  • Banks in Disguise
• Stat #12 – Pet Spending
  • Americans Spent $186 Billion on Pets Last Year

12 Insightful (and Unbelievable!) Statistics About Markets & Investing

This show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network.

Taylor Schulte: Hey everyone, before we start today’s show, just a quick heads up that my annual tax cheat sheet that is by far the most downloaded guide every single year has officially been updated for 2025.

This simple two page cheat sheet includes just about every important number that you would need for your retirement and tax planning next year, especially for those who are navigating around that pesky Medicare IRMAA surcharge. Updated federal income tax brackets, AMT annual limits, standard deductions, Social Security taxation summary, estate and gift tax annual limits.

If it’s an important figure needed for any sort of tax or retirement planning, you will find it on this two page guide that’s been updated to include all of the new adjustments for 2025.

If you’re already a Stay Wealthy Retirement newsletter subscriber, you received your copy last week. If you’re not a subscriber, visit youstaywealthy.com/email, or click the link in the episode description in your podcast app, and you’ll immediately receive the two page PDF.

Okay, on to today’s show.

Welcome to Stay Wealthy Podcast. I’m your host, Taylor Schulte, and this is officially the last episode of 2024. Given that, I’m keeping it light and having a little fun to round out another great year hosting this show.

On that note, this show would be nothing without all of you. Your engagement, your emails, your great questions, helpful suggestions, and even your constructive criticism. I’m incredibly grateful for your trust and support. And trust me, I don’t take this microphone for granted. So thank you.

Thank you for tuning in and contributing to another rewarding year. I hope you enjoy the holidays with your friends, family, and loved ones. And I’m looking forward to helping you Stay Wealthy in 2025 and beyond.

With that, I’m excited to have some fun today by sharing 12 fun, surprising, and in some cases, unbelievable statistics about the markets and investing. To access the show notes and view the articles supporting these stats, just head over to youstaywealthy.com/233.

On December 3rd, McDonald’s announced the return of the McRib. If you’re not familiar with the McRib, it’s a popular sandwich that includes a boneless pork patty shaped like a rack of ribs, barbecue sauce, onions and pickles on a bun.

And naturally, this exciting announcement caused investors across the world to wonder if the return of this mouthwatering menu item would have a positive effect on the S&P 500, i.e.the US stock market.

Now, while we don’t have a crystal ball and can’t predict the future, as evidence-based investors, we can lean on historical data to try and determine if the availability of the McRib does in fact indicate that higher daily returns for US stocks may be ahead.

Not everyone is cut out for this type of research, but thankfully, friend and guest of the show, Nick Majulli, has taken on the task.

And here’s what he found. From 2010 to 2023, the McRib was on the McDonald’s menu during 21% of all trading days. And on those trading days, when the McRib was available, he found that the S&P 500 had an average daily return that was 0.06% higher than when it wasn’t on the menu.

Now, that doesn’t sound like much when represented as a daily percentage, but if you annualize this 6 basis point difference, the McRib market, i.e. the US stock market when the McRib is on the menu, the McRib market has historically outperformed the non-McRib market by 19% annually since 2010. And here you thought, successful investing required decades of education, CFA’s and PhD’s.

Sticking with market statistics that have me questioning everything I’ve ever learned about investing, there’s a new cryptocurrency that’s been making headlines recently called Fartcoin.

Yes, it’s called Fartcoin. And yes, it is completely useless. However, while it may be useless, as of December 12th, Fartcoin’s market cap, i.e. its total value, was greater than 38% of all American publicly traded companies.More specifically, as of December 16th, the value remained well above $800 million.

For reference, Scholastic Education, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, with over $1 billion of annual revenue, only has a market cap of $700 million, more than $100 million less than a digital coin named after my kid’s favorite potty word.

Okay, bringing us back to a more familiar place, thanks for bearing with me there, just had to have a little fun.

This next statistic is related to the CAPE ratio. The CAPE ratio, also known as the Schiller PE ratio, is a valuation method popularized by Professor Robert Schiller out of Yale University, and it’s used to determine how overvalued or undervalued a stock or asset class might be.

If, by the CAPE ratio’s definition, an asset class is overvalued, it suggests that lower future returns should be expected by investors.

If, on the other hand, an asset class is deemed to be undervalued by the CAPE ratio, investors should expect higher future returns. So, as of December 5th, 2024, the CAPE ratio for the S&P 500, i.e. the US stock market, was 38.81.

And Benjamin Felix, CIO of PWL Capital, found that, going all the way back to 1871, there are only 23 months when the US had a CAPE ratio that was at this level today, or higher. And while he went back and combed through over 150 years of data, he found that all 23 of these months were concentrated around 1998 to early 2000.

In other words, the only other time US stocks were this overvalued as defined by the CAPE ratio was during the tech bubble of the late 90s.

And the average 10 year forward return starting with these 23 months when the CAPE was above 38 resulted in an annualized negative 1.29%.

Now, this time could certainly be different. It can be argued that valuation metrics like CAPE has flaws. And just because the US stock market appears overvalued doesn’t mean it can’t continue to go up. So I’m not sharing this stat to suggest a collapse of the S&P 500 is around the corner. But by most measures, valuations in the US are stretched. And if anything, investors may take this into consideration during their next portfolio review.

Okay, statistic number four. In 2023, the S&P 500 produced a positive return of 26%. Year to date here in 2024, through December 16th, the S&P 500 is up about 29%. According to Ben Carlson, since 1928, there have only been three times when the S&P 500 produced back-to-back annual returns of 25% or higher.

Those three times were 1935 and 1936, 1954 and 1955, and 1997 and 1998. In 1937, the year after the first back-to-back 25% plus return years, the US stock market dropped 35%. However, in 1956, the year after the second occurrence, the market was up 7%. And in 1999, the year after the third occurrence, the market was up 21%.

As noted in the last statistic, just because the market has gone up a lot doesn’t mean it can’t continue to go up. And as Ben notes in his article, quote, it’s impossible to draw many conclusions from a sample size of three, but it’s important to remember one or two years of return data doesn’t help much when it comes to predicting next year’s returns.

Okay, while back-to-back 25% return sounds great, wait until you hear this next statistic. I think it’s safe to say that everyone listening knows and likely subscribes to Netflix, but I’m willing to bet that most are unaware of the wild history of this stock.

So Netflix as a company debuted in 1997, but it wasn’t until May of 2002 when the company went public and began trading on the NASDAQ.

Its stock was first offered through an initial public offering price of $15 per share, only to get cut in half within the next few months of trading. But that was just the beginning of what would be a bumpy, volatile road for the company’s stock.

Since going public in 2002, Netflix stock has experienced 3 separate drawdowns of over 75%. In 22 short years, 3 catastrophic drawdowns. If that’s not crazy enough, those 3 separate drawdowns of 75% or more eventually led to the stock price hitting new all-time highs.

In other words, it wasn’t a large drop followed by a respectable recovery that gave investors some hope only to be followed by another large drop. It was a 75% plus drop followed by the company making critical changes in response, leading to new all-time highs for the stock price 3 separate times. The most recent of the 3 75% plus drawdowns occurred in late 2021, which was followed up by the stock rallying 400% to new all-time highs just 6 months later.

If you’re not familiar with break-even math, let me put this into perspective for you. If an investment loses 30% of its value, it takes a 43% return for an investor to get back to where they started to break even. If an investment loses 50% of its value, it takes a 100% return to get back to even. If an investment loses 60% of its value, just 10% more, it takes a 150% return to break even. But if a stock like Netflix drops by 75%, a 300% rate of return is required for an investor who wrote it from the top to the bottom to break even. Just insane stuff.

Speaking of insane stuff, statistic number six, from 1965 through 2023, a 59-year time period, a measly $100 invested in Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, grew to just over $4.2 million.

The same $100 investment in the S&P 500 at the same time would have only been worth $30,000. In other words, Berkshire Hathaway’s stock can stand to lose 99% of its value and still match the return of the S&P 500 over those 59 years.

Another one from our good friend, Nick Maggiulli. If you had beaten the stock market by 5% per year from 1960 to 1980, a 20-year time period, you would have made less money than if you had underperformed the market by 5% per year from 1980 to 2000, the 20-year period immediately following.

I’ll say that again.

If you had beaten the stock market by 5% per year, you had a crystal ball, you beat the stock market by 5% per year for 20 years from 1960 to 1980, you would have made less money than if you had underperformed the market by 5% per year from 1980 to 2000.

Sometimes when you begin investing can be more important than anything else.

In addition to when you begin investing, the underlying fees you pay to invest in a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund also heavily influences your long-term returns.

And those actively managed funds with high internal fees are not dead like most of us low-cost passive investors might think.

In fact, these funds have grown their assets under management by about 40% over the last 10 years, bringing their total net assets to a value of almost $14 trillion.

And according to a paper published by Stuart Brown this year, a professor of finance at Florida State, investors paid about $90 billion of fees on that $14 trillion.

In percentage terms, that’s about 0.64% per year, significantly higher than most low-cost index funds that provide investors with access to the same asset classes around the globe.

Speaking of asset classes, the S&P 500 is the most commonly referenced US stock market index. However, the Russell 3000 is actually a better representation of the entire US market, as it represents approximately 96% of all investible securities in America. And while it’s called the Russell 3000, the index today only tracks 2,670 stocks.

Out of those 2,670 US stocks in the index, 101 of them are up 100% or more this year. 13 of the stocks in the index are up 300% or more. 5 of them are up 500% or more. And there’s one stock that I promise nobody will ever guess that’s up more than 1,000% this year. That stock is a company called Gene DX, and it’s up more than 2,700% here in 2024.

Look, it’s been a good year for US stocks, but even in a good year, many stocks suffer. For example, of the 2,670 stocks in the Russell 3,000 index, more than 1,000 of them have a negative return this year. In fact, there are more stocks in the index down 50% or more than there are up 100% or more.

Stock picking is hard, and a relatively small percentage of stocks in broad based indexes like the Russell 3,000 or the S&P 500, only a small percentage of those stocks in those indexes are responsible for the total returns each year.

All right, statistic number 10. According to the Wall Street Journal, Japan’s stock market hit a record high on February 22nd, 2024. It took 34 years to reach that new high. To put that into perspective, the S&P 500 has hit 50 new all-time highs this year alone.

Okay, a couple lighter stats to bring us home here. Statistic number 11. There are 33 million Starbucks rewards members. I’m one of them. One out of 10 American adults are Starbucks rewards members. 

At the end of March of 2024, there was $1.9 billion of stored card value on Starbucks’ balance sheet. In other words, nearly $2 billion of Starbucks card value is either lost or has been forgotten about by these 33 million Americans.

Perhaps this is a good reminder to log in to your Starbucks account to check your balance and spend some of that money.

All right, statistic number 12. Lastly, for all of you animal lovers out there, myself included, according to The Economist, Americans spent $186 billion on their pets last year. More than was spent on childcare.

OK, hopefully you enjoyed today’s episode and hopefully you’re now ready to go enjoy the holidays and the rest of your 2024 with friends, family, and perhaps some of those wealth destroying pets.

Thank you once again for another rewarding year. Thank you for continuing to listen and engage with the show.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, feedback, or you just want to say hi, you can send me an email at podcast at youstaywealthy.com.

And if you’re looking for a last minute gift for me and you’re not sure what to get, an honest written review in the Apple Podcast app and or a star rating in the Spotify app are all that’s on my Christmas list this year.

With well over 2 million podcasts out there, discovering new shows remains a challenge for people and your kind reviews help those that are looking for retirement planning and investing help find this one right here.

Lastly, don’t forget to grab my gift to you, the updated 2025 tax cheat sheet. Just click the link in the episode description in your podcast app or visit youstaywealthy.com/email. And to view the research supporting today’s episode, just head over to youstaywealthy.com/233.

Thank you again for tuning in and I’ll see everyone back here next year.

Episode Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. This podcast is not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or other professional services.