I’m going through my annual tradition of updating historical return data now that we’ve turned the calendar on another year. Some people have resolutions. I have spreadsheets. Aswath Damodaran updates annual returns for stocks, bonds, cash, gold and housing at NYU each year going back to 1928. I love slicing and dicing this dataset. Here are the updated returns through year-end 2025 (along with the inflation rate for good measure): {chart} Now here are the returns by decade going back to the 1930s: {table} Gold and stocks are both having a wonderful decade thus far. Bonds…not so much. It’s also interesting to note ... (full story)