You should be happy with average! It is better to be the market than to beat the market. It isn’t very often in life that you don’t want to be better than most ... But at the end of this chapter, you should want to be average when it comes to investing!
Adopt a Low-Cost Strategy—Minimize Expenses
The next three chapters may not be the most exciting part of the book, but they might just be the most important, so ... stay with me here.
Historically, market returns have averaged around 8.5% annually. So, as you saw from the compounding example in Chapter 1, this book will use 8.5% as a historical return average. That does not mean that in any given year returns won’t be better or worse, but over the long term, 8.5% is the approximate average.
