Ten Years, Fourfold: VOO’s Delightfully Predictable Triumph

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Investing in “the market” has become tiresomely fashionable, darling. Yet few vehicles exemplify this trend’s vulgar efficiency better than the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO 0.56%). With its $1.5 trillion in assets, this particular index fund has achieved a vulgar ubiquity that would make even a Roman emperor blush. But let’s not moralize – we’re all here for the numbers, aren’t we?

Can you beat the market?

Tracking the S&P 500 is the financial equivalent of wearing beige at a cocktail party – staggeringly dull, yet maddeningly effective. This ETF’s passive strategy, while aesthetically uninspiring, has the virtue of mimicking the index’s gains (and occasional losses) with mechanical precision. The broad sector exposure is reassuringly democratic, though one suspects the fund’s preference for large-cap stocks stems from a distinctly bourgeois aversion to risk.

Warren Buffett, that oracle of Omaha, famously declared that most investors should “never attempt to beat the market.” How droll! The man built his fortune dissecting inefficiencies while prescribing mind-numbing passivity for the masses. One might almost call it cheeky. But his holding company’s brief dalliance with index ETFs suggests even the sharpest minds occasionally crave boredom.

The index’s average 10% annual return is the sort of number that makes private bankers tingle with carnal delight. It’s a performance that shames bonds’ timid yields and real estate’s exhausting maintenance demands. Consider this: a thousand dollars invested a decade past would now purchase three thousand nine hundred reasons to smile at one’s brokerage statements. A quadrupling! Though true sophisticates would call it “acceptable returns with minimal effort.”

Leaving funds to compound is the investment equivalent of cultivating orchids – requires patience, but rewards with vulgar abundance. Should you lack the imagination to find better uses for your capital, VOO’s relentless arithmetic will continue its symphony of geometric growth. 🚀

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2025-12-02 00:57