The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch has a list of Ten Investing Rules to Throw Away. Number one:
Rule #1: You can safely trust the stock market to outperform over a decade.
Reality: Anyone who invested in Wall Street in the summer of 1998 and held on has earned just 9%. That's the total return on the Standard & Poor's 500 index, and includes reinvested dividends. And that's before inflation. Bonds, and savings accounts, did far better. If you held your cash in an account earning an average of just 3%, for example, today you'd be up 34%.
Sigh.
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