Expectations vs. reality: a five-year retrospective on asset class performance

May 2025

In early 2020, few could have predicted the scale of disruption that COVID-19 would bring to markets, economies, and everyday life. As we look back on the last five years, it is worth asking: how did our expectations for major asset classes hold up in the face of such unprecedented events? In this piece, we revisit our pre-pandemic return assumptions and compare them with actual outcomes from 2020 to 2024. Along the way, we explore some of the macroeconomic forces—like inflation, interest rate shifts, and earnings growth— that helped shape the results.

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