You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gwern comments on Donating while in temporary debt (i.e. as a student) - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: ancientcampus 05 February 2013 10:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (36)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 06 February 2013 04:20:15PM *  6 points [-]

Use much larger international samples, including data from markets that shut down or had long interruptions. Doing this brings the return down several percent from the USA estimates; for example, Jorion 2003.

(It stands to reason that to maximally avoid survivorship bias and diversify, you would want to invest equally in every country, at which point your portfolio would grow something like the growth rate of the global economy which is ~2% annually over the last century or two IIRC; ironically, this apparently has happened to the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund - it's too big to invest significantly in any particular market, so they are ultra-diversified and have what looks like low annual returns.)