But this year through May, Apple—the largest stock in the U.S. market, with a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion—has been responsible for 17% of the market’s returns.

The average stock market return is historically 10%, although it changes from year to year. Returns can vary, but buy and hold is the most likely to yield long-term results.

Since it's the most popular benchmark option, we analyzed the average annual stock market returns using the S&P 500 index. Here is how it has performed over the years.

The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index. In some years, the market returns more than that, and in other years it returns ...

The answer is that from 1900 to 2012, the stock market has tended to deliver annual ten-year nominal returns of 7.96% on average whenever the "total cost of capital" is within a 1% range of where ...

Read on to see the average S&P 500 return in every month of the year. ... Investors can learn a few lessons from the chart above. First, the stock market goes up more often than it goes down.

Furthermore, valuation has mattered over longer horizons: when the price-to-forward earnings has exceeded 20, the subsequent five-year S&P 500 return has, in most cases, been low or negative.

These Stock Market Charts Will Make You a ... so unusual that nobody should be using last year as an example of how the market ... made by a deeper look at 2019's sector performance chart.

For the year to date, Energy is up more than 40%, and the basic materials, financial services, and industrials sectors all saw strong returns. Technology brings up the rear with a loss of 0.38%.