What is the correlation between time (years) and the S&P 500, e.g., r = __?

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Request for Question Clarification by omnivorous-ga on 01 Jun 2004 12:54 PDT

Waddington --

Are you seeking the average annual return for the S&P500?  With or
without dividends?

Any particular time period that you're seeking?  (Its predecessor goes
back to 1923 and the S&P500 dates to 1957.)

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

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Clarification of Question by waddington-ga on 01 Jun 2004 13:05 PDT

All possible combinations would be best, but if I must choose, let's
say: The since-1957 version.  With dividiends.  I'm picturing
something like this:
1957 = 200
1958 = 210
...
1999 = 1400
...
then we take the correlation coefficient
make sense?

Waddington --

Two of the best sites for historical stock quotes are Yahoo! Finance
and BigCharts.com

BigCharts.com has the S&P500 index back to January, 1970 and here's
how you can get it:
1.	Go to the Historical Quotes site on the web page:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/historical/

2.	Enter SPX -- the symbol for the S&P500 Index.  You'll want to enter
1/2/1970 or 12/31/1971  to make sure that you're getting the first (or
last) trading day of the year -- and be prepared to try 1/3 or 12/30
if there's no data because those days happened to fall on a weekend.

The S&P500 index includes dividends, as well as stock splits, warrants
and other rights.  Starting in 1988, it started assuming the
reinvestment of dividends.  The index itself, created in 1957, is
important enough that the Commerce Department uses it as one of the
leading economic indicators.  And as such, many academic studies of
stock market returns have been done:
Brain Bank
"History and Structure of the S&P 500" (undated)
http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/FINANCE/SandP500Hist.html

Note too that there are some standard deviation calculations on the
Internet for the S&P indices:
Financial Forecast Center
S&P100
http://www.forecasts.org/daily/sp1005day.htm

S&P500 Historical Trend
http://www.forecasts.org/data/stpoortrnd.htm


Google search strategy:
Historical Standard & Poor's


Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA