No one can say for sure what the returns on common stocks will be. But the stock market, as Oskar Morgenstern once observed, is like a gambling casino where the odds are rigged in favor of the players. Although stock prices do plummet, as they did so disastrously in the early 2000s and in 2007, the overall return during the entire twentieth century was about 9 percent per year, including both dividends and capital gains.
