The last five years have been very good for stock market investors. The S&P 500 SPDR as a proxy for the overall market has produced a 13.2% average annual return for the five years through the end of September 2015. However, going into the future, it looks like returns may be lower, possibly a lot lower. If you are like a lot of investors and need your investment account values to grow to meet your income needs in the future, it may be time to implement some different strategies to select stocks.

Recently I was watching Bloomberg and caught an interview with Ray Dalio, the founder and chairman of Bridgewater Associates, a very successful money management and hedge fund firm managing over $150 billion. He started the company in 1975, so Dalio has participated in the markets through numerous up and down cycles. In the interview he made a pretty good argument that the overall stock market returns will average just 3% to 4% per year for the next decade. If you are interested you can see the video excerpt here.

With economic activity around the globe slowing and the U.S. GDP growing at an anemic 2% to 3% per year, investment returns matching the economic growth rate seem like a strong possibility. The above average (the S&P 500 averaged 8.75% per year since the early 1990’s) returns of the last five years were primarily due to the natural market recovery out of the 2008-2009 bear market caused by the financial crisis. Now stock prices are more dependent on company earnings growth, and on average profits will grow at about the same rate as the overall economy.

A shift to lower overall returns from the stock market means that some of the current popular strategies will not work very well. Buying index ETFs, using a robo investing program or working with an advisor that farms out your money may very well lead to disappointing results a decade from now. To have acceptable investment results for the next 10 years requires an individual stock selection strategy that will separate out the small number of winners from the expected very average pack of stock market returns.