Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input.

Long term investing alternative to mutual funds
Typically mutual funds will report an annualized return. It's probably an average of 8% per year from the date of inception of the fund. That at least gives some basis of comparison if you're looking at funds of different ages (they will also often report annualized 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10- year returns, which are probably better basis of comparison since they will have experience the same market booms and busts...).  So yes, generally that 8% gets compounded yearly, on average. At that rate, you'd get your investment doubled in roughly 9 years... on average... Of course, "past performance can't guarantee future results" and all that, and variation is often significant with returns that high. Might be 15% one year, -2% the next, etc., hence my emphasis on specifying "on average". EDIT: Based on the Fund given in the comments: So in your fund, the times less than a year (1 Mo, 3 Mo, 6 Mo, 1 Yr) is the actual relative change that of fund in that time period. Anything greater is averaged using CAGR approach. For example. The most recent 3 year period (probably ending end of last month) had a 6.19% averaged return. 2014, 2015, and 2016 had individual returns of 8.05%, 2.47%, and 9.27%. Thus that total return over that three year period was 1.0805*1.0247*1.0927=1.21 = 21% return over three years. This is the same total growth that would be achieved if each year saw consistent 6.5% growth (1.065^3 = 1.21).  Not exactly the 6.19%, but remember we're looking at a slightly different time window. But it's pretty close and hopefully helps clarify how the calculation is done.