Where on the web can I find a table showing the historical performance of the total US stock market?

Question

I'm looking for the annual performance of the total market, or at least the S&P 500 component, over a long term (60 years or more) expressed as a percentage total return.

Answer 1

Three general directions for parts of that information. Value Line makes its business keeping trading information over the long range. The Dow Jones company also does that, and a good piece can be gathered from the Wall Street Journal or its web service called MarketWatch. The S&P500 information can be directly found, for part of your period at their sister organization BusinessWeek (you can get it at Standard & Poors, but it is even more involved). Each of these, to some degree (some very small degree) have some free data, but most of it, usually all the good stuff, you will have to pay extra for access. Otherwise, check some of the business school websites, there may be links to statistics or students who are proud of research when they have already researched this for class (like you perhaps? hmm?).