Here's What Happens When You Only Invest in S&P 500 ETFs (2024)

FAQs

Here's What Happens When You Only Invest in S&P 500 ETFs? ›

Meanwhile, if you only invest in S&P 500 ETFs, you won't beat the broad market. Rather, you can expect your portfolio's performance to be in line with that of the broad market. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. See, over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has delivered an average annual 10% return.

Choosing your investments

Investing in an S&P 500 fund can instantly diversify your portfolio and is generally considered less risky. S&P 500 index funds or ETFs will track the performance of the S&P 500, which means when the S&P 500 does well, your investment will, too. (The opposite is also true, of course.)

ETFs make a great pick for many investors who are starting out as well as for those who simply don't want to do all the legwork required to own individual stocks. Though it's possible to find the big winners among individual stocks, you have strong odds of doing well consistently with ETFs.

Over the past decade, you would have done even better, as the S&P 500 posted an average annual return of a whopping 12.68%. Here's how much your account balance would be now if you were invested over the past 10 years: $1,000 would grow to $3,300. $5,000 would grow to $16,498.

Stock Market Average Yearly Return for the Last 20 Years

The historical average yearly return of the S&P 500 is 9.88% over the last 20 years, as of the end of April 2024. This assumes dividends are reinvested. Adjusted for inflation, the 20-year average stock market return (including dividends) is 7.13%.

Assuming an average annual return rate of about 10% (a typical historical average), a $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 could potentially grow to approximately $25,937 over 10 years.

You can't directly invest in the index itself, but you can buy individual stocks of S&P 500 companies, or buy a S&P 500 index fund through a mutual fund or ETF. The latter is ideal for beginner investors since they provide broad market exposure and diversification at a low cost.

Market risk

The single biggest risk in ETFs is market risk. Like a mutual fund or a closed-end fund, ETFs are only an investment vehicle—a wrapper for their underlying investment. So if you buy an S&P 500 ETF and the S&P 500 goes down 50%, nothing about how cheap, tax efficient, or transparent an ETF is will help you.

Holding an ETF for longer than a year may get you a more favorable capital gains tax rate when you sell your investment.

Many fiduciary financial advisors favor exchange-traded funds over individual stocks for diversification and risk management. Personalized or direct indexing is a way of using individual stocks to enhance returns while simultaneously mitigating risk.

How much is $1,000 a month in the S&P 500 for 20 years? ›

Terms may apply to offers listed on this page. Investing $1,000 a month for 20 years would leave you with around $687,306. The specific amount you end up with depends on your returns -- the S&P 500 has averaged 10% returns over the last 50 years.

A stock portfolio focused on dividends can generate $1,000 per month or more in perpetual passive income, Mircea Iosif wrote on Medium. “For example, at a 4% dividend yield, you would need a portfolio worth $300,000.

This means that your $1,000 10 years ago — technically, $1,002 — would have bought 60 shares of Tesla. As of Mar. 3, 2024, those 60 shares of Tesla would be worth $12,158.40. That marks a 28.342% annual rate of return.

How the Rule of 72 Works. For example, the Rule of 72 states that $1 invested at an annual fixed interest rate of 10% would take 7.2 years ((72 ÷ 10) = 7.2) to grow to $2. In reality, a 10% investment will take 7.3 years to double (1.10^7.3 = 2).

From 2005 to 2020, for instance, the Vanguard Small-Cap ETF beat the S&P 500 by several percentage points.

While indexes may be low cost and diversified, they prevent seizing opportunities elsewhere. Moreover, indexes do not provide protection from market corrections and crashes when an investor has a lot of exposure to stock index funds.

Of course it's possible to make a significant amount of money by continuously investing in an S&P 500 Index Fund! In fact, it's one of the simplest and most effective ways to build wealth over time.

Less than 10% of active large-cap fund managers have outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 15 years. The biggest drag on investment returns is unavoidable, but you can minimize it if you're smart.