For those people that like immediate gratification whilst searching for returns [and general stats] for the S&P 500 over certain periods: S&P 500 at your fingertips [http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2006/12/sp-500-at-your-fingertips.html] Quote: Countless hours have been spent by stock market investors researching the historic performance of the S&P 500 stock market index but until now they've had to slog through spreadsheets or go datamine other reams of data to be able to extract the data they're after and that's before doing any number crunching! Now however everything has changed because we here at Political Calculations are putting the entire encapsulated history of the S&P 500 at your fingertips! We've taken the raw data from the sources linked above and made it easily accessible by selecting a month and year in our tool below. The tool will provide the average index value of the S&P 500 for the given month a...(more)