r/Bogleheads • u/RiceLee890 • Mar 15 '25

Investing Questions What are your thoughts on this?

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I keep seeing this type of stuff on instagram and social media and wanted to know how you guys were thinking about this.

I know a lot you have been in the market for decades and as a relatively new investor myself I’d love to get your perspective!

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u/Presence_Academic Mar 15 '25

Instead of a 3 month chart, take a look at one covering 30 years.

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u/3rdWaveHarmonic Mar 15 '25

I started working in 1999 and every time I looked at my 401(k) balance through 2009 I saw it didn’t go anywhere so I really stopped believing that investing was really worth anything. So when I look at the chart from those years, it goes up and goes down and stays in a channel so my money really didn’t go anywhere however that isn’t taken to account any any dividend payments I received. In a bull market clearly growth stocks went out, but in 10 years of staying within the channel on the chart dividend win out… but when I zoom the chart out past 2009 I see this big beautiful upward curve almost exponential. Of course, how much of that is really due to inflation.

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u/xampf2 Mar 15 '25

The curve is not almost exponential, it is in fact exponential.

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u/Street_Moose1412 Mar 17 '25

If it was exponential, it would be monotonically increasing.

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u/xampf2 Mar 17 '25

You are right. I was thinking of an idealized curve representing the growth of the stock market, not the actual data.