[toasty228]

> in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?

It's nothing because it happens all the time, it's not statically relevant, like not at all: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

This forum is full of techies with very strong opinions about their toys but 0 economical, political or historical education, and it shows

[no-name-here]

Those kind of returns would generally be considered at least ‘good’ even if they weren't excluding some of the best performing stocks such as AI as was done here. Some periods truly have no returns or even negative returns, even without excluding some of the best performing stocks like was done here.

And even more so since inflation was 2-3%, not considered high, during most of that period.