THis has been a good year for the stock market.  S&P 13% return, Dow 15% return. You should expect your portfolio return very close to the market return at least, if not more than that. If it is only 8%, you might wanna investigate your portfolio and adjust your asset allocation and investment style to fit your long-term goal, or it might be that some fund itself is poorly managed. One simple way is to use morning star, which has a lot of basic knowledge you wanna know before you build up retirement portfolio. For those who are lazy to do the research, index fund may be a good choice. Again, I find morning star , fidelity all have very good educational articles. Doing your homework is the key..