S&P 500 Gained About 148% Through 2024 After Buffett’s Hedge-Fund Bet

The S&P 500 continued delivering substantial gains after Warren Buffett won his decade-long wager against a group of hedge-fund investments. From the beginning of 2018 through the end of 2024, the index returned approximately 148%, including dividends, based on a calculation using annual figures published by Berkshire Hathaway.

That works out to roughly 13.8% a year compounded over seven years. It answers a narrower, verifiable version of the question raised by the supplied Motley Fool headline: the benchmark continued growing after the contest, but these figures do not measure performance through the October 2026 date in the supplied URL.

Buffett’s original contest covered 2008 through 2017 and pitted an inexpensive S&P 500 index fund against five funds-of-funds selected by Protégé Partners. Those portfolios invested in more than 200 hedge funds, according to Buffett’s account in Berkshire’s 2017 shareholder letter.

The index fund gained 125.8% during the wager, equivalent to an annualized return of 8.5%. The five competing portfolios recorded cumulative gains ranging from 2.8% to 87.7%, with one liquidated in 2017. Buffett presented the outcome as evidence supporting his argument that investment expertise can struggle to overcome layers of fees.

The subsequent market advance was uneven. Berkshire’s 2024 shareholder letter lists S&P 500 returns, including dividends, of negative 4.4% in 2018 and positive 31.5% in 2019. Gains of 18.4% in 2020 and 28.7% in 2021 were followed by an 18.1% loss in 2022.

The index then returned 26.3% in 2023 and 25% in 2024. Compounding those seven annual results produces the approximately 148% cumulative gain; simply adding the percentages would give an incorrect result. Because the published inputs are rounded, the calculated cumulative figure is also approximate.

There is an important distinction between that benchmark calculation and the return earned by an investor in a particular fund. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor.gov guidance explains that investors cannot buy an index directly and that funds tracking one incur expenses. Actual fund results can therefore differ from index returns.

Costs remain central to the comparison. Investor.gov notes that passive management can reduce expenses, although not every index fund is cheaper than an actively managed alternative. When two portfolios’ holdings perform identically, lower costs generally leave investors with higher returns.

The post-2017 figures also do not prove that the index kept beating the original hedge-fund portfolios. Buffett’s published scorecard ended with the wager, and the portfolios’ names were not publicly disclosed under the agreement. A rising benchmark alone cannot establish how those competitors subsequently performed.

The documented conclusion is that the S&P 500’s gains continued through 2024, despite two losing calendar years along the way. Extending that assessment requires later verified returns and, for a renewed head-to-head comparison, comparable results from the competing investments. Neither the original victory nor the subsequent advance guarantees future performance.