[martincmartin]

> There is also the issue of survivorship bias. The SP500 and Dow Jones indices regularly discard the losers and add new companies, so we don't know the true results of holding companies for a long period of time.

That's certainly true in marketing material of fund managers. But it's not true in honest academic papers, like this one. There's lots of data out that about total returns of the stock market, that takes into account dividends and survivorship bias.