What Is Drawdown? Why It Matters More Than Your Win Rate Every year, DALBAR — a US-based financial research firm — publishes a study on how ordinary investors actually perform versus the broader market. The 2024 edition found that the average equity investor earned 16.54%, while the S&P 500 returned 25.02%. That's a gap of nearly 8.5 percentage points — in a single strong year for markets. The gap didn't come from bad stock picks. It came from behaviour. Investors pulled money out of equity fund