> If it is red 20-30 years into the line, that means that money put it at the beginning had a negative cumulative return No, this is only true if its dark red.

> If it is red 20-30 years into the line, that means that money put it at the beginning had a negative cumulative return No, this is only true if its dark red. The way you present the data of the graph does not represent how people invest. The average person works for ~40 years, so there are 40 individual years you could track on this graph. However, that isn't useful because compounding interest is a huge factor in returns. Another variable is people dont invest the same amount every year (typically people make more money as they age, however in most cases, compounding returns beat out income gains over the long term). Consider if year one someone places $10,000 into the stock market. 40 years later, it grows into $48,000 (real value after inflation). If you extend the diagonal boxes to 25, 30, 40, or 50 years, which makes more sense given how long people work and how long they live after retiring, the cumulative growth is _always_ above inflation.