They assume that the “average” stock-market profit means something to a real person; in fact, it is the extremes of profit or loss that matter most. Just one out-of-the-average year of losing more than a third of capital—as happened with many stocks in 2002—would justifiably scare even the boldest investors away for a long while. The problem also assumes wrongly that the bell curve is a realistic yardstick for measuring the risk. As I have said often, real prices gyrate much more wildly than the Gaussian standards assume.
