The story is slightly more complicated than that. Most people who put money into their 401ks end up with positive real returns. If you invest in the whole marke

The story is slightly more complicated than that. Most people who put money into their 401ks end up with positive real returns. If you invest in the whole market, you're going to get positive real returns in something like 96% of historical 30 year periods. [1] Most mutual funds/ETFs invest in a large enough portion of the market that this number isn't far off. People who buy a small number of individual stocks end up in a different situation. While their average return is positive, those results have a large degree of skewness (meaning most stocks stagnate or fall, but the meteoric rise of those that do well makes up for it on average). If you picked a random stock in 1992, you'd quite likely have lost money by now. [1]: https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/224 https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/224