This chart has been doing the rounds of social media lately.
It demonstrates five things.
- You can have an immensely successful social media career and still not understand the basics of topics you comment on. The same is true for journalists who have been reposting it without comment.
- The chart is of zero relevance to people who hold and trade individual stocks due to the survivor bias implicit in the maintenance of indices.
- The S&P500 was not quoted until 1957 so anything before then is simply a mash-up of disparate unrelated data and therefore completely irrelevant
- Ignoring the above – scale counts – the thing you cannot see are the lost decades for investors. Again, something that commentators missed.
- Most have no idea of market history.
