Based on the first chart. Capital income from housing doesn't matter very much compared to non-housing capital income (check out how closely that latter is correlated).
Also capital income from housing actually looks to be declining pretty sharply for almost a decade?
To the extent housing does matter it looks a lot less volatile than non-housing capital income.
TL;DR. More people are renting vs buying nowadays. Real estate has been a relatively good investment since WW2 but stock markets have appreciated more. Water is wet.
Regarding stock market returns, I'm curious if the calculated returns on stocks as a class properly takes into account failed companies. Take the FTSE 100. If a mid-tier one of those companies fails (Lehman's collapse for example) the FTSE 100 doesn't lose 1% of it's value. Instead the 101st most valuable UK company takes it's place. Does anybody know how well measures of stock market returns take into account effects like this? Or are they measured on the total market value of all traded equities?
It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.
I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.
So I think you are right about issues existing; survivorship bias and limitations/concerns when using an index as a proxy. These are usually mentioned in the fine print hidden at the bottom if they are acknowledged at all.
The FTSE 100 does not measure returns on stocks as a class. But it does take into account failed companies.
The FTSE 100 measures returns of 100 market cap weighted companies. How FTSE 100 handles things like dividends, adding or removing companies, historical data...There are hundreds of pages of explanations, rules, formulas, disclaimers and other methodologies at the bottom on the website: http://www.ftse.com/products/indices/uk
If a company represented 1% weight of the index (somewhere around the 30th largest company might be ~1%). If that company suddenly failed and it's stock price dropped to a tiny fraction of a pence (or basically zero), then yes the index will drop 1% in value. Company sized #101 will take it's place the next day.
Maybe more important: the company does not even have to fail for this 1% drop, if the market just thinks the company will fail and no one wants to buy the stock, it will push the price down to zero and the index will drop 1%.
Scary thoughts.
Stocks are worth what someone wants to buy it for and there is no other definition.
The price you see was the last price someone was willing to pay for it.
Stock returns are not about companies successes and bankruptcies, though there is a strong connection obviously. What investors think about a company and its stock price is more important and what stock returns measures are showing.
Flash crashes happen and financial crises happen but in general companies tend to fail slower than Lehman. So investors will sell at different points as a company's stock price falls. Different indexes will track this. As a stock leaves the FTSE 100 it may enter the FTSE 250. There are indexes with thousands of stocks. And there are 100,000+ indexes out there. Pick the one most relevant to you. No index will be perfect. You can always create your own.
The big famous indexes are often products/services run by companies and they compete. LSEG and Standard & Poor's (S&P 500) for example. These companies selling their index licenses and index data and other related stuff are usually public companies so their stock is in its own indexes. It can get circular weird. For the FTSE 100 look at the London Stock Exchange Group (ticker LSE) website under products and services- FTSE Russell: http://www.lseg.com/
Hope this helps a bit. Apologies if not clear. I find this stuff can be confusing sometimes and I work in finance and do this all day. Happy to happy more if I can.
TL:DR Indexes are just proxies but they do capture company failure. How they do it involves looking at the fine print methodology for the index you are using.
Could that decline also be due to new home owners who are purchasing at high prices (due to cheap debt) are finding that they aren't making anywhere near as much from renting those places out because the expense ate up their margins?
Yes, I think that happened and not clear the effect or extent of it.
Capital income from housing is complicated and messy to study partly because of imputed rents.
This leads to weird situations where expensive homes whether you live in it, rent it, rent it at loss (or leave it empty) can be counted as rent.
My guess is a big reason for the decline over the last ~10 years is housing prices took a hit after the financial crises in 2007/2008. It looks like owner-occupied went down more than tenant-occupied based on Figure 2 in the link.
Also capital income from housing actually looks to be declining pretty sharply for almost a decade?
To the extent housing does matter it looks a lot less volatile than non-housing capital income.
TL;DR. More people are renting vs buying nowadays. Real estate has been a relatively good investment since WW2 but stock markets have appreciated more. Water is wet.