The golden age of stock market returns for Canadian investors looks to have ended sometime in 2007:
Adjusted for inflation, the S&P/TSX has literally only provided returns for those able to take advantage of the significant dips in valuations post 2000:
If we look at annual returns for holding periods of 10 and 15 years we can see capital gains in decline:
For those investors unfortunate enough to be paying through the nose for closet indexing mutual fund investments, the real capital returns are likely to be lower still, and more so after tax. The golden age looks to have peaked in and around 2007. This is around about the same time that debt and GDP growth took their separate routes.
If equity markets and commodity prices remain depressed they are clearly going to detract from economic momentum going forward and may well exacerbate the latent fissures in the residential property market that we already know off (i.e. high consumer debt loads and historically high valuations).
Wage and salary growth has also been on a slide:
So yes the drop in market valuations is a concern given the accompanying commodity price weaknesses and other structural risks that have built up in the Canadian economy over the decade. This will likely raise the odds of much more aggressive monetary and fiscal policy.
This is more or less a follow up from a December 2014 post:
Is Canada’s Mini Golden Age behind it? http://blog.moneymanagedproperly.com/?p=3969
And in the context of the above, this is worth a read – http://tcglobalmacro.blogspot.ca/2015/12/recession-made-in-canada-definition.html?m=1