charting retirement

There is reason to be nervous about U.S. stocks, despite their outsized performance in recent years.

It is hard to argue with the success of the U.S. stock market in recent years, but let me try.

As the chart below shows, $10,000 invested in U.S. stocks at the start of 2011 would have grown to $93,000 as of Aug. 29, 2025. (This is based on the MSCI USA index, which has a long-term performance very similar to that of the S&P 500. I used MSCI for all the other indexes. I wanted the comparisons to be direct and consistent.)

That equates to a compounded annual return of 16.1 per cent. No other region was even close: EAFE stocks – companies in 21 countries in Europe, Australasia and the Far East (East Asia) – returned 10 per cent a year, Canada 9.1 per cent, Europe 6.8 p

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