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Over the long term. Let's go back 150 years and invest in a random stock market wherever you happened to live. If you lived in the USA or England, this was a
by btilly 7y ago
Over the long term. Let's go back 150 years and invest in a random stock market wherever you happened to live.
If you lived in the USA or England, this was a great idea and worked out brilliantly.
If you lived in countries like Italy, Germany and Russia, you lost everything when those stock markets were closed down in the first half of the 20th century.
You can't say "historically over the long term" then project forward for the next 50 years based only by the results of the last 50 years in the market where things have worked out best.
Over our lifetime, equities are indeed the best bet. But not a guaranteed safe one.
- AgentOrange1234 7y agoThis is very interesting. I never heard about these other stock markets. Going to have to look into this.
- lutorm 7y agoIf you lived in countries like Italy, Germany and Russia, you lost everything when those stock markets were closed down in the first half of the 20th century. This may be true, but then we're talking about such large changes that investment advice sort of becomes pointless. I mean no doubt that life would have sucked in those situations, but there's no investment choice that would have saved you either. Like, if we were sitting today contemplating WW3 breaking out in 1960, annihilating the civilized world, the market going down would have been the least of your problems.
- btilly 7y agoI mean no doubt that life would have sucked in those situations, but there's no investment choice that would have saved you either. Guaranteed saving, no. But keeping an emergency supply of highly portable wealth in the form of gold worked surprisingly well for most of those historical examples. (The ironic exception being the USA where we confiscated people's gold under Roosevelt.)
- int_19h 7y agoIt didn't work particularly well in Russia, either.