The Y axis scaling is so misleading.
In what way?
A semi-log presentation is perfectly suited for this type of data. (To be frank, I would find any other presentation to be misleading.)
See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
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Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#12The Y axis scaling is so misleading.
It's logarithmic scaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale
It's helpful when dealing with investments because it shows percentage change more clearly than absolute: https://www.leekranefuss.com/2019/04/why-you-should-use-loga...
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#13Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#14Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#15Classic meme.
I wish I had invested $1,000 back in 1926 but I was busy in a non-material state in the hyper-realm.
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was relatively stable if you could go back to the century before that graph starts, when there was no federal reserve.
Now do frequency of recessions, depressions, and panics.
You mean like the great depression which happened not long after formation, which some prominent economists have argued was exacerbated by the fed?
Things did stabilize quite a bit after we bombed the rest of the industrial world into oblivion, though, creating a period of prosperity roughly equal in expansion to the period from the end of the civil war to before the creation of the fed.
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#17When I was born in 1990 my grandparents spent like 5k on government bonds that my dad didn't tell me about until I was 30. It was a very nice treat, but when I did the math to see how much more it would have been if just invested in the market I gasped.
Not comparing apples to apples, though. Those government bonds were, by any reasonable measurement, risk free (EDIT: as another commenter noted, not exactly, we could call them "minimal risk"), while "the market" is not.
Looking back in hindsight is always risk-free, though, which can lead to faulty conclusions.
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#18Rule of 72: time for an investment to double is roughly 72 / the interest rate [0]. Annual return on small-cap stocks: ~12% Time to double: 72/12 ~= 6 years Number of doubling periods: 99/6 ~= 16 Final investment value: ~2**16 ~= $65k ~= $64,417 Math checks out. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
I've always found it amusing that mathematically it should be the rule of 70, but it's commonly rounded to 72 because the latter has more convenient divisors.
70 is divisible by 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35, 70
72 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 72
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#19This isn't a chart of returns; it's a chart of who had nerves of absolute steel. Be honest, who here has actually lived through a major dip and not been tempted to smash that "sell" button?
Re: See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf]
#20Perfect time to revisit the Futurama episode where Fry realizes he's rich.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwkaLt9pf8