Actually...it's a little different. In the stock market, that gain you're talking about comes from investing in the 'market portfolio', which is equivalent to i

Actually...it's a little different. In the stock market, that gain you're talking about comes from investing in the 'market portfolio', which is equivalent to investing money in every single stock on the market. That would be like betting on all of the numbers on the board at once -- because of the payouts on individual numbers, 35 to 1, you'll eventually still go broke. You could easily make back-to-back-to-back-... poor decisions and end up broke, because 'broke' is an absorbing state and most math models assume you're stuck at 0 once you hit 0. See "Martingale" at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29