[coliveira]

Nonsense, the stock market can (sometimes) help on retirement, but apart from professional traders, I haven't seen anyone who got rich simply by investing in stocks, and I know a lot of people who make good money. This is a myth propagated by the Wall Street.

[manigandham]

When people talk about getting rich, beware that they're mostly talking about getting rich quickly in a matter of months or years. That won't happen, but you can definitely retire as a millionaire from modest means.

It's simple math that investing even minor amounts over your life can compound greatly.

[WalterBright]

> I haven't seen anyone who got rich simply by investing in stocks

I know quite a few. You can read about more in the book "The Millionaire Next Door" by Stanley.

Heck, anyone who bought AMZN, MSFT, AAPL at the opening price, and held, is a wealthy person today.

[coliveira]

It is very easy to point at a company that is extremely successful today and say that it was "just a matter of investing in AAPL". The difficult is to know which company is the good one at the IPO. Thousands of seemingly great companies have failed during the last decades. Moreover, 30 years ago AAPL was a failing company. I don't think there is anyone with good sense that bought AAPL at the IPO and held that investment in their portfolio during that period. Less so with MSFT, but even MSFT lost 80% of its value in 2001. I don't think anyone wise would keep their fortune on MSFT, unless required by law.

If you read the "millionaire next door", you'll see that they made this money by saving, not by (just) investing in the market.

[WalterBright]

> but even MSFT lost 80% of its value in 2001

No, it was 50%. It's up around 400% since the bottom.

> The difficult is to know which company is the good one at the IPO

It's fine if you don't want to invest because of the risk. But to then say it's unfair that others who do take the risk get the rewards is ... unreasonable.

[WalterBright]

> they made this money by saving, not by (just) investing in the market

Even if you saved $20,000 a year, it would take you 50 years to save a million. But if you invested that instead, at a conservative 7% a year, you'd wind up with $9 million.

You'd pass a million after 22 years.

https://www.daveramsey.com/smartvestor/investment-calculator

[coliveira]

Not investing in the stock market doesn't mean that you'll put your money under the mattress. There are several investment vehicles, from fixed income to real state and including your own businesses. These investment are much safer and are not so correlated to the craziness and plain criminality happening on Wall Street.

[WalterBright]

> fixed income

These often don't even beat inflation. The provider can also go bust like any company.

> real estate

I am the poster boy for losing pots of money on "can't lose" real estate.

> your own business

The failure rate for your own business is 80-90% in the first 5 years.

Stocks are far safer.

[chii]

there's empirical evidence that by using a broad, well diversified index fund, and consistently remained invested in the market, you can get an average return of about 6-7% per annum over the very long run (30+ yrs).

The problem is only when you don't have enough "spare" wealth to invest because the daily costs have all eaten up your paycheck. That's a problem i dont know how to solve.

[coliveira]

There is empirical evidence that people only come up with this "average" on periods when the market is at the top. If you did your calculations around 2008 you would see a very different picture.

It is easy to be bullish on the market when everything seems to be doing well; a wise person needs to look at different periods, and see that the stock market also has produced a lot of disasters. People who lack this perspective are bound to be engulfed by such disasters. Heck, I hear that even professional investors, who are paid to buy stocks, are starting to take their money out of the market fearing of what might come next.

[chii]

> Heck, I hear that even professional investors who are paid to buy stocks, are starting to take their money out of the market fearing of what might come next.

and that's why most active managed funds perform worse than most passive index funds. that's why stock picking doesn't work for most (unless you're buffett). That's why timing the market doesn't work.

People are too emotional. If you stick to an algorithmic method (of putting in part of your paycheck every month), ride the ups and the downs (don't sell, don't take on debt to buy extra, unless you can afford the debt easily etc), you will come out ahead more times than behind.

[WalterBright]

> Heck, I hear that even professional investors, who are paid to buy stocks, are starting to take their money out of the market fearing of what might come next.

I hear that most every day, every year, every decade. There's always plenty of reasons to not invest. There's always an article in the financial news predicting imminent doom.

I ride them up, down, and back up again.