Join for free

Money insights

Investing research and money insights

Most of our research so far comes from The Illusion of Wealth, an overview and six research articles in which we priced gold, housing, savings, shares, Berkshire Hathaway, Nvidia and Bitcoin against 100 years of growth in the US money supply.

Start with the overview Browse by topic

We measure against M2 rather than CPI because we wanted to know whether an investment had really grown or had only kept pace with new money, and the four figures below shaped most of what we found.

  • US M2 growth since 1926 522x $43.7bn to $22.8tn
  • Average yearly M2 growth 6.56% The hurdle every asset is measured against
  • Average savings return 3.4% About 95% of purchasing power lost over 100 years
  • S&P 500, dividends reinvested 11,570x Against 468x on price alone

Featured series

The Illusion of Wealth

The series grew out of one question, which was whether anything had really gained value over the last century or had simply been carried upward by a 522-fold rise in the money supply. We tested 30 hypotheses across 100 years of data to answer it, and the six parts follow the results in order, from the traditional safe havens in Part I to the base-case scenarios for 2030 and 2035 in Part VI.

Start with the overview
  1. Part I Gold vs Real Estate Returns & Which Asset Beat Inflation? The 100-Year Performance
  2. Part II Stocks vs Inflation: Does the Stock Market Beat Inflation? Avoid the Savings Trap
  3. Part III Historical Asset Class Returns: The 100-Year Scorecard
  4. Part IV Warren Buffett Returns, Berkshire Hathaway Performance & IPO Winners
  5. Part V Crypto vs Stocks: Bitcoin & Tech in the Digital Era
  6. Part VI Nvidia Stock Prediction & Gold Price Forecast 2030: The Modern Playbook

Browse by topic

All topics

All articles

7 published
Four terms used throughout

How we measure it

M2 money supply
All the cash, current accounts and easy-access savings in the US, as measured by the Federal Reserve. It is the yardstick for every chart in our research because it tracks how fast new money is created.
M2-adjusted value 1.0 = break-even
An asset’s growth divided by the growth in M2 over the same years, so anything above 1.0 gained share of the money pool and anything below it lost share, even if the price went up.
The 6.56% hurdle 6.56% a year
The average annual growth of US M2 over the last century, and the rate an investment had to beat after reinvesting its income just to keep pace. More about The 6.56% hurdle
Total return
Price growth plus every dividend, rent payment or coupon put back into the investment. In our research it is what separated the winners from the assets that fell behind. More about Total return
Live tools

Live data to go with the research