America Kicks Ass!

In celebration of the Independence Day holiday, I wanted to take this week to remind everyone that America is one of the best places on Earth to live...

And for our purposes in HX Research, it's also the best place to be as an investor.

Longtime readers know I have a very "American" story.

My grandfather's family – a combination of Pueblo Indian and Spanish – has been in this country since the late 17th century. The Pueblo have been there for about 7,000 years, and the Spanish date back to 1692 in New Mexico.

My grandmother's family were Scottish and German immigrants from the Midwest and West.

This family grew up very poor, with a long history of substance abuse. My father had six brothers, two of whom died before they turned 35 and one more who's about to pass away.

My mother's family was from Uruguay—immigrants from the Basque country and Brazil—and was much better off. My grandfather was the CEO of the country's utility company and one of the founders of the most prominent liberal political party in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, his timing wasn't great as a military dictatorship took over the country. My uncle was jailed for seven years as a "terrorist," and my family's house was regularly strafed with machine-gun fire by the "milicos."

My mother got stuck here in the early 1970s. She would have been jailed if she had returned to her home country. Instead, she met my father at a hair salon – he was a successful hairdresser – and they got married to keep her here.

We had it very rough as my father's legacy trauma continued to haunt us and led to a volatile life, including living in dozens of places, going bankrupt multiple times, and briefly experiencing homelessness.

My first blessing, however, was my mother. She was an absolute rock and fought hard to get the two of us out of our terrible situation.

My second blessing was being born in America.

Back in Uruguay, my mother would have been imprisoned and probably have died... not to mention, the health care she received here also saved her life many times versus what she would have received there.

Despite the volatile environment my father created, America allowed my mother to have a career, it allowed me to get an excellent education, and it allowed us to pull ourselves out of poverty and violence.

A lot of people talk about how life is better in other countries. And I'm not saying the U.S. is the only great country in the world. But I don't think there's another place where we would have had the opportunity for my mother to survive and thrive and for me—a poor Hispanic kid from Phoenix—to go on to become a successful Wall Street investor for more than two decades.

And while we could debate whether the U.S. is the best place on Earth, there's no debating that it's the best place to invest.

We compared the S&P 500—the benchmark U.S. index—to other major stock indexes worldwide, using Bloomberg's data.

We used the STOXX Euro 600 Index as a proxy for Europe, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index for emerging markets, the Nikkei 225 for Japan and the Hang Seng Index for China and Hong Kong, and

Let's look at how the S&P 500 performed against each...

Going back more than 35 years, U.S. stocks have more than quadrupled the performance of European stocks...

They've also outperformed emerging markets by more than quadruple across the same period.

The same as their performance against Japanese stocks going back to 1990...

The Hang Seng Index is not the best measure for China, but the S&P 500 has outperformed that by more than three times!

The data is clear: Over a significant sample size, U.S. stocks have been the best place for long-term investors.

While it's impossible to know whether past performance will indicate future performance, this Independence Day holiday, I want to remind you that the U.S. remains a great place to live and invest.