You might be completely right - stocks have historically had famous crashes. But they've always recovered in time, because they represent ownership in productiv

You might be completely right - stocks have historically had famous crashes. But they've always recovered in time, because they represent ownership in productive businesses. A great tool to see the exact numbers for stocks over the last 150 years is http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm The main takeaway is they fluctuate a lot, so if you need a guaranteed profit in 10 years they're not for you. But if you'll probably leave your money in 20 years, you'll probably double or quadruple your buying power by the end. That risk is why index ETFs with a retirement target year in the name shift your porfolio to treasury bonds, as the target year approaches. There's a lot of people in your camp that think the stock market's a bubble. And there's a lot of people in the camp that AI is going to become a multiplier on the GDP, warranting further growth. And all these ideas are priced in. I'm young with high risk tolerance so I'm still 100% stocks. But I still advise people to manage their own portfolio and just choose their ratio of index funds to treasury bond, according to risk tolerance. The tickers I'd use are VTI for stocks (risky but averaged 9.3% for 150 years) and VUSTX for treasury bonds (4.3%). Buying those two things is super simple - no manager siphoning off 0.5% (i.e. 10-15% by retirement) needed.