You're right Itchyfeet, I was being a bit over the top. People were making sweeping statements about very high returns that just haven't been there over time. Let us look at some of the foundations for saying that people expecting high returns are asking for trouble.
The long term Australian SWR is 3.6% or 3.8% rather than the 4% that is usually quoted, and I have always looked at 4% as being a bit of an anomaly for the US anyway as EVERYWHERE else has a lower SWR from all the studies Wade Pfau has done comparing those for different countries. Ours is lower because of a series of bad years in the stock market in the 60s. Sure, 100% equities tends to work out a bit better than the 60/40 scenario that SWRs are calculated on, but there are also extreme cases of failure with 100% equities. To expect superannuation (which has an extra layer of administration) to have higher returns is a little unreasonable.
The ASX is a bit difficult to work with because franking credits started in the late 80s and since then equities have behaved differently to how they did beforehand. Also, since the GFC many people have been talking about investments having a long period of lower returns - but they are also all saying that (probably) your generation is never going to be able to afford a house. People tend to look at the current situation and expect it to last forever, and that is not the case. Things change, sometimes quite dramatically, and everyone's assumptions go down the drain. I suspect that both statements are going to prove to be wrong, even though they are both correct now.
Finally, Bee21.
I would dearly like us to have an Oz section. It has been asked about before, and it was a no go. There are an enormous number of people from the US on the forum. A couple of years ago I looked into who read MMM (you can't work out easily where people in the forum itself are from, but you can for the MMM readers). From memory something like 80% were from the US. There were an exceedingly high number of Canadians - maybe 15%. We came in pretty low. What was interesting was that Australia had quite a high penetration rate - about half that of Canada - which would put us at about 5% of MMM readers, since we have 2/3 the population of Canada. The moderators were quite amazed at how high the numbers were for Canada and Australia, but even then it was still a no go.
It gets a bit frustrating when someone starts an Australian thread (like the one a while ago about housing in Australia), and some know-it-all from the US completely kiboshes the thread. However, that has only happened a few times. If you put Australia in the title, a lot of us manage to flock to it, and we have good discussions.