20. Wall Street Is Rigged Against the Individual Investor
It’s a popular sentiment that Wall Street is essentially a casino that does not favor the individual investor. However, the data shows us that’s just not true.
“Too often I have heard that you might as well go to Las Vegas as invest in Wall Street,” said Robert R. Johnson, professor of finance at Creighton University. “Truth be told, the stock market is a positive-sum game. That is, on average, the market advances and has done so for many years. The market goes up about two-thirds of the time and falls about one-third of the time when measured annually.”
He pointed to stock data compiled since 1926 by Ibbotson Associates, which shows that a diversified portfolio of large capitalization stocks, such as S&P 500, had a compounded average of 10 percent annually.
