looking for research tool to plug in and evaluate theoretical historical returns
"The professional financial advisors do have tools which will take a general description of a portfolio and run monte-carlo simulations based on the stock market's historical behavior. After about 100 simulation passes they can give a statistical statement about the probable returns, the risk involved in that strategy, and their confidence in these numbers.  Note that they do not just use the historical data or individual stocks. There's no way to guarantee that the same historical accidents would have occurred that made one company more successful than another, or that they will again. ""Past performance is no guarantee of future results""... but general trends and patterns can be roughly modelled. Which makes that a good fit for those of us buying index funds, less good for those who want to play at a greater level of detail in the hope of doing better. But that's sorta the point; to beat market rate of return with the same kind of statistical confidence takes a lot more work."
"Assume they do not overwithhold. You pay in $500/mo, and every time it hits $3000, they pay the tax. Engineers call this a sawtooth function, it looks like this.  The average balance is not $3000, but close to $1500. The very simple math is $1500 * rate * years.  It looks like your equation except it's not 58, it's just the years. And the question is whether you can make more than $850 on $1500 average before you sell. I wouldn't be so quick to plug in 29 years, as the average home ownership is 7 years, and depending, who knows if a refinance is in your future?  The bottom line - How long would it take you to get a 57% return (2350/1500)? Ironically, the most responsible (and risk averse) person would say ""decades. Banks offer less than 1%."" even an 8% market return, while not guaranteed, is close to 7 years. But, if you carry 18% credit card debt, you can pay it down a bit each month and let it float back up every 6 months. Less than 4 years to break even." There are several paths of study you could undertake. If you want to learn the fundamentals of the stock market and become a financial analyst, then finance, economics, and accounting (yes, accounting) are all good to study either on your own or in an institution. Furthermore, if you want to study a specific industry, it can't hurt to know a fair amount of the science behind that particular industry. For example, if you want to understand the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industries, knowledge of clinical trials, the FDA's approval process (in the US, at least), off-label uses for drugs, genetic engineering, etc. are all good to know. You don't have to become an expert, but having a firm grasp on the science is extremely useful when evaluating a company's prospects. If you're interested in becoming an algorithmic trader or a quant, then physics, certain fields of engineering, signals processing, applied math, computer science, or econometrics will get you much farther than a standard finance or accounting degree. Most people can learn the basics of finance; not everyone can learn advanced mathematics. A lot of the above applies to learning about the forex market as well. Economics is certainly helpful, especially central bank policy, but since the forex market is so massive and liquid, many mathematical tools are necessary because algorithms play a key role as well. Per littleadv's suggestion, an MBA with a concentration in finance may be an option for someone who already has a degree. Also, an MSF (Master of Science in Finance) or a degree in financial engineering (called an MFE, or ORFE, for Operations Research and Financial Engineering) are other, potentially better options for someone pursuing a more technical career. A high-octane trading firm may not care that you've taken marketing and management classes; they want to hire someone who can understand complex algorithms and design and implement new ones quickly.  Some MSF programs are pre-experience programs, which means that in exchange for taking more time to complete, they don't expect you to have significant work experience in the financial industry. An MBA might require such experience, however. I think you're missing Simon Moore's point. His point is that, due to low inflation, the returns on almost all asset classes should be less than they have been historically, so we shouldn't rebalance our portfolio or withdraw from the market and hold cash based on the assumption that stocks (or any other asset) seem to be underperforming relative to historical trends.  His last paragraph is written in case someone might misunderstand him, he is not advocating to hold cash, just that investors should not expect as good returns as has happened historically, since those happened in higher inflation environments. To explain: If the inflation rate historically has been 5% and now it's 2%, and the risk-free-market return should be about 2%, then historically the return on a risk-free asset would be 7% (2%+5%), and now it should be expected to be 4% (2%+2%). So, if you have had a portfolio over some time you might be concerned that the rate of return is worsening, but Simon's point is that before you sell off your stocks / switch investment brokers, you should try to figure out if inflation is the cause of the performance loss. On the subject  of cash: cash always loses value over time from inflation, since inflation is a measure of the increase in prices over time-- it's a part of the definition of what inflation is.  That said, cash holdings lose value more slowly when inflation is lower, so they are relatively less worse than before. The future value of cash doesn't go up in low inflation (you'd need deflation for that), it just decreases at a lower rate, that is, it becomes less expensive to hold- but there still is a price. As an addendum, unless a completely new economic paradigm is adopted by world leaders, we will always see cash holdings decrease in value over time, since modern economics holds that deflation is one of the worst things that can happen to an economy. "Here is the ""investing for retirement"" theoretical background you should have. You should base your investment decisions not simply on the historical return of the fund, but on its potential for future returns and its risk. Past performance does not indicate future results: the past performance is frequently at its best the moment before the bubble pops. While no one knows the specifics of future returns, there are a few types of assets that it's (relatively) safe to make blanket statements about: The future returns of your portfolio will primarily be determined by your asset allocation . The general rules look like: There are a variety of guides out there to help decide your asset allocation and tell you specifically what to do. The other thing that you should consider is the cost of your funds. While it's easy to get lucky enough to make a mutual fund outperform the market in the short term, it's very hard to keep that up for decades on end. Moreover, chasing performance is risky, and expensive. So look at your fund information and locate the expense ratio. If the fund's expense ratio is 1%, that's super-expensive (the stock market's annualized real rate of return is about 4%, so that could be a quarter of your returns). All else being equal, choose the cheap index fund (with an expense ratio closer to 0.1%). Many 401(k) providers only have expensive mutual funds. This is because you're trapped and can't switch to a cheaper fund, so they're free to take lots of your money. If this is the case, deal with it in the short term for the tax benefits, then open a specific type of account called a ""rollover IRA"" when you change jobs, and move your assets there. Or, if your savings are small enough, just open an IRA (a ""traditional IRA"" or ""Roth IRA"") and use those instead. (Or, yell at your HR department, in the event that you think that'll actually accomplish anything.)" Trading data can be had cheaply from:  http://eoddata.com/products/historicaldata.aspx  The SEC will give you machine readable financial statements for American companies for free, but that only goes back 3 or 4 years.  Beyond that, you will have to pay for a rather expensive service like CapitalIQ or CRSP or whatever.  Note that you will need considerable programming knowledge to pull this off. I use and recommend barchart.com. Again you have to register but it's free. Although it's a US system it has a full listing of UK stocks and ETFs under International > London. The big advantage of barchart.com is that you can do advanced technical screening with Stochastics and RS, new highs and lows, moving averages etc. You're not stuck with just fundamentals, which in my opinion belong to a previous era. Even if you don't share that opinion you'd still find barchart.com useful for UK stocks. Up until now I was looking at general European market and then dividing it up by sectors, but a country-specific distribution would also be a possibility, but I am afraid that the amount of work required to divide things up that much might be too much. Then again, it honestly might not. It could very well be that I'll come across this information during my research and if that's the case, it would certainly be worth incorporating into my paper.   My intention is to take pieces of my thesis and turn them into separate specials for my employer to publish if my employer allows me to work on my thesis at work over the summer. We'll see. Hoping to be done by the end of September, so we'll see. I'll certainly be sure to keep the subreddit posted. My thesis will also certainly make it over to my [Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/dwietstruk). See the Moneychimp site. From 1934 to 2006, the S&P returned an 'average' 12.81%. But the CAGR was 11.26%.  I wrote an article Average Return vs Compound Annual Growth to address this issue.  Interesting that over time only a few funds have managed to get anywhere near this return, but the low cost indexer can get the long term CAGR minus .05% or so, if they wish.