Hdgs to be removed from the S&P/ASX Indices
As I said in the comments, from the SMH article, you will get $3.30 per share you hold in Wotif. The bit about Wotif veing replaced in the S&P ASX200 index by another company has no impact on your shares in Wotif. It just means that the index (the amalgamation of 200 companies) will have one drop out (Wotif) and another replace it (Healthscope).
If your question is truly just  What is good growth? Is there a target return that's accepted as good?   I assumed 8% (plus transaction fees). Then I'd have to point out that the S&P has offered a CAGR of 9.77% since 1900. You can buy an S&P ETF for .05%/yr expense. If your goal is to lag the S&P by 1.7%/yr over the long term, you can use a 85/15 mix of S&P and cash, sleep well at night, and avoid wasting any time picking stocks. "I will give a slightly different answer which is actually an addendum to JoeTaxpayer's (soon-to-be-edited) answer. Do NOT go to your financial advisor and ask him ""How do I go about transferring my Roth IRA to ....""? where .... is whichever broker or mutual fund family that you have chosen from the list that Joe has suggested.  Instead, go to the website of the new group (or call their toll-free number) and tell them ""I want to open a Roth IRA account with you and fund it by transferring all the money in my Roth IRA from First Clearing."" Your new Roth IRA custodian will take care of all the paperwork and get the money transferred over at no cost to you except possibly fielding a weepy call from your current financial advisor because he had just ordered his new Lamborghini and now will have difficulty making payments on his auto loan. ""Why are you leaving me? After all the years we have had together?"" You will need to choose some place to put the money, and I suggest that you use their S&P 500 Index Fund,  not the S&P 500 ETF, just the standard vanilla S&P 500 Index Mutual Fund. This recommendation is almost heresy in this forum, but it is better to pay the extra 0.01% fee that the Fund charges over and above the ETF until you become a little more savvy and are ready to branch out into individual stocks (which is when you really need a brokerage account). Revelation: I have never made the transition and invest only in mutual funds which does not require a brokerage account. After doing all this, pay no attention whatsoever to your Roth IRA investment or how the S&P 500 Index is doing for the  next 20 years. This will help avoid the temptation of taking all your money out just because the Index went down a little. Everybody is told ""Buy Low, Sell High"" but far too many folks end up doing exactly the opposite: buying because the stock market is up and selling when it starts going down." "Being long the S&P Index ETF you can expect to make money. The index itself will never ""crash"" because the individual stocks in it are simply removed when they begin performing badly. This is not to say that the S&P Index won't lose 80% of its value in an instant (or over a few trading sessions if circuit breakers are considered), but even in the 2008 correction, the S&P still traded far above book value. With this in mind, you have to realize, that despite common sentiment, the indexes are hardly representative of ""the market"". They are just a derivative, and as you might be aware, derivatives can enable financial tricks far removed from reality. Regarding index funds, if a small group of people decide that 401k's are performing badly, then they will simply rebalance the components of the indexes with companies that are doing well. The headline will be ""S&P makes ANOTHER record high today"" So although panic selling can disrupt the order book, especially during periods of illiquidity, with the current structure ""the stock market"" being based off of three composite indexes, can never crash, because there will always exist a company that is not exposed to broad market fluctuations and will be performing better by fundamentals and share price. Similarly, you collect dividends from the index ETFs. You can also sell covered calls on your holdings. The CBOE has a chart through the 2008 crisis showing your theoretical profit and loss if you sold calls 2 standard deviations out of the money, at every monthly interval. If you are going to be holding an index ETF for a long time, then you shouldn't be concerned about its share price at all, since the returns would be pretty abysmal either way, but it should suffice for hedging inflation." With a long enough time horizon, no matter when you buy, equities almost always outperform cash and bonds. There's an article here with some info: http://www.fool.co.uk/investing-basics/how-when-and-where-to-invest/ Holding period where shares have beaten cash  There was a similar study done which showed if you picked any day in the last 100 years, no matter if the market was at a high or low, after 1 year your probability of being in profit was only 0.5, but after 10-20 years it was almost certainly 1.0.  Equities compound dividends too, and the best place to invest is in diversified stock indices such as the S&P500, FTSE100, DOW30 or indices/funds which pay dividends. The best way to capture returns is to dollar cost average (e.g. place a lump sum, then add $x every month), to re-invest dividends, and oh, to forget about it in an IRA or SIPP (Self invested pension) or other vehicle which discourages tampering with your investment.  Yes, values rise and fall but we humans are so short sighted, if we had bought the S&P in 2007 and sold in 2009 in fear, we would have missed out on the 25% gain (excluding dividends) from 2007-2014. That's about 3% a year gain even if you bought the 2007 high -beating cash or bonds even after the financial crisis. Now imagine had you dollar cost averaged the entire period from 2007-2014 where your gain would be. Your equity curve would have the same shape as the S&P (with its drastic dip in 2009) but an accelerated growth after. There are studies if you dig that demonstrate the above. From experience I can tell you timing the market is nigh impossible and most fund managers are unable to beat the indices. Far better to DCA and re-invest dividends and not care about market gyrations! .. AAPL will not drop out of NASDAQ100 tomorrow. From your own quote: The fund and the index are rebalanced quarterly and reconstituted annually That is true. You will not be able to reconstruct the value of the index from the data returned with this script.  I initially wrote this script because I wanted data for a lot of stocks and I wanted to perform PCA on the stocks currently included in the index. Assuming S&amp;P value as % of GDP doesn't change, to get S&amp;P return you add (Nominal GDP % growth + Dividend Yield) -&gt; S&amp;P return.  Historically the S&amp;P has grown faster as corporations of won market share and therefore grown to a larger portion of GDP.  While this can continue (or possibly reverse), and can happen globally as well, you are correct in pointing out that it cannot continue ad infinitum. The long term view you are referring to would be over 30 to 40 years (i.e. your working life). Yes in general you should be going for higher growth options when you are young. As you approach retirement you may change to a more balanced or capital guaranteed option. As the higher growth options will have a larger proportion of funds invested into higher growth assets like shares and property, they will be affected by market movements in these asset classes. So when there is a market crash like with the GFC in 2007/2008 and share prices drop by 40% to 50%, then this will have an effect on your superannuation returns for that year. I would say that if your fund was invested mainly in the Australian stock market over the last 7 years your returns would still be lower than what they were in mid-2007, due to the stock market falls in late 2007 and early 2008. This would mean that for the 7 year time frame your returns would be lower than a balanced or capital guaranteed fund where a majority of funds are invested in bonds and other fixed interest products. However, I would say that for the 5 and possibly the 10 year time frames the returns of the high growth options should have outperformed the balanced and capital guaranteed options. See examples below: First State Super  AMP Super  Both of these examples show that over a 5 year period or less the more aggressive or high growth options performed better than the more conservative options, and over the 7 year period for First State Super the high growth option performed similar to the more conservative option. Maybe you have been looking at funds with higher fees so in good times when the fund performs well the returns are reduced by excessive fees and when the fund performs badly in not so good time the performance is even worse as the fees are still excessive. Maybe look at industry type funds or retail funds that charge much smaller fees. Also, if a fund has relatively low returns during a period when the market is booming, maybe this is not a good fund to choose. Conversely, it the fund doesn't perform too badly when the market has just crashed, may be it is worth further investigating. You should always try to compare the performance to the market in general and other similar funds. Remember, super should be looked at over a 30 to 40 year time frame, and it is a good idea to get interested in how your fund is performing from an early age, instead of worrying about it only a few years before retirement.