Paltry 401k Investment Returns

Jerry Kalish over at Retirement Plan Blog discusses the most recent study issued by Dalbar, a Boston-based financial research firm that annually issues a report called the Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB).  The QAIB examines the returns that investors actually realize and the behaviors that produce those returns.  What jumped out at Jerry was the following:

While the S & P 500 earned an average return of 8.41% from 1988 to 2008, the average equity investor earned a mere 1.87%.

Wow.  And these were equity investors, not folks who had stashed their stuck all their retirement money in bonds and Treasuries.  As Jerry points out, this is bad news for folks relying on their 401k investments for retirement.

rb