Realistic Individual Investor Outcomes

Should measures of long-term investment performance incorporate ways in which typical individual investors handle their portfolios over a lifetime rather than an idealized perspective such as buy-and-hold with all distributions reinvested? In his December 2025 paper entitled “Measuring Investor Outcomes”, Hendrik Bessembinder argues that investment performance measures should be realistic and discusses alternative measures of returns. Using monthly performance data for the broad U.S. stock market from the end of 1926 through 2022, he finds that: (more…)