I like history and I think everyone should have an idea about the past. I saw recently one historical chart and have thought it would be interesting to collect some investment related (50y+ or so) ones. For a general education and as a help to disperse FUD. I can imagine we can also discuss what’s wrong with them.
There were already various charts posted throughout the forum, and if we can collect them in one place, it would be nice I think.
This chart showin the historical development of Dow Jones index overlaid with various historical events. Extremely US biased, of course, but still very instructive I think.
It is correct that Dow Jones is the oldest stock market index, but unfortunately it means that the way it is constructed is really terrible. First it’s a price Index, so in theory the value is obtained by summing-up prices of underlying components. A more correct way is a market capitalization weighting. There are some kind of weights used to calculate DJI nowadays, but I don’t think there were many options in 1896.
Second it doesn’t count in reinvested dividends, which one should do to obtain the total return. This is a common problem with stock market indices anyway. So when chart’s author writes that it took 25 years to recover from the great depression, this is wrong. A portfolio with reinvested dividends would recover faster.
Caveat, in the past there was no actual fund that you could pick to execute this strategy for you.
I like this historical chart, especially inflation-adjusted.
This one is very nice too: https://www.newyorklifeinvestments.com/assets/documents/education/investing-essentials-growthofadollar.pdf.
I found the ‘Periodic Table of Investment Returns’ instructive, which lists the returns for various asset classes sorted by performance. It reminds me to not try to predict the next winner and just have a slice of the world market instead.
From:
Certainly a great strategy.
But to compare the different returns, you‘d have to add each years return for every asset class, not which asset class was in 1st place most often. 
Stocks and history, what could be a nicer topic to think about during a weekend!
Well, I think that unfortunately authors of this nice picture were taking things too much at its face value.
UK version 1900 A.D. (24.2%) is rather today’s: UK 3.47% + Canada (?) 2.79% + India 1.95% + Australia 1.67% + Hong Kong 0.41% + South Africa 0.32% + Singapore (?) 0.32% + Ireland 0.07% + New Zealand 0.05% = 11.05% 6.15%. Three times more Almost twice than the nominal UK share!
Oops, Australia and South Africa are already listed separately for 1900! I will leave it open 
France 1900 (11.2%) would include a bunch of African countries, but none of them seems to be in ACWI today.
Russia 1900 (5.9%) would be today’s Russia (around 0.5% of ACWI, I think, before it was excluded for being uninvestable) + Finland (0.23 %) + Poland (0.09%) = around 0.8 0.6%.
“Austria” 1900, 5.0%, would be today’s Austria 0.03% + Czech Republic 0.02% + Hungary 0.02% = 0.07%. More than double the nominal value! (But pathetic anyway).
Netherlands 1900 (2.5%) would be today’s Netherlands 1.19% (thanks ASML) + Indonesia
0,19% = 1.38%. Not so bad, actually.
I also don’t know how to factor in the semicolonization of China by foreign powers in 1900. Anyway, a large part of 1900 valuation is due to depend territories and outright colonies (see Belgium).
Edit: checking DMS database for 1900 classification.
Topic title says [COFFEE] Historical charts so nobody will blame me for posting this, right?
I’ll see myself out.
Well, Starbucks and coffee seem to have almost no correlation, maybe that’s telling us something?
—>[.]
Nothing that we don’t know already.
Make a 50/50 portfolio and rebalance quarterly → profit 
I would like to broaden the topic of this thread: focus not only on charts, but also other data and long-term trends etc. The goal is to get distracted and detached from the daily buzz and try to look broader, as well as hopefully learn something for ourselves.
I suspect that a significant amount of content that I will provide are going to be reposts from “Weekend Reading” by Bankeronwheels.com. This is what I personally find interesting and worth sharing. Feel free to ignore, comment or add.
Some more histories:
Will you also allow cute historic anecdotes?
Actually, seeing your subsequent post to the one I am quoting you seem to be doing exactly that.
Allow me thus to link an audio clip on the Guiness IPO in 1886: give it a a few minutes, it’s worth it and includes throwing stones for bids …
(if somehow the clip does not take you directly to 1:05:26 – skip until that time of the video)
I own this little book …
… it’s very hard to read
For me, it is. Tried some years ago and had to put it back for “later”, right next to Don Quijote, and forgot about it.
Book-marked the article above and might try a translation of the book later 
Came across this just now … US market against the rest of the world:
Striking.
Kind of incredible, actually.
The author/Tweeter of said graph thinks it’s time for a reversal.
We’ll see, I guess?
You can prove almost any thesis… by choosing the right time interval.
It literally can‘t go on forever, or else the US would become close to 100% of the market.
Valuations also would suggest some kind of reversal in the future.
