"To me, the three biggest risks most investors face are that their portfolios won’t provide the returns needed to meet their spending needs, that their portfolios will face ruin, and that a large share of their wealth will be taken away (e.g., through high taxes)...

To gain perspective, I imagined that I was dropped into 1900 to see how my investments would have done in every decade since. I chose to look at the 10 greatest powers as of 1900 and skip less-established countries, which were more prone to bad outcomes. Virtually any one of these countries was or could have become a great, wealthy empire, and they were all reasonable places for one to invest, especially if one wanted to have a diversified portfolio.

*Seven of these 10 countries saw wealth virtually wiped out at least once, and even the countries that didn’t see wealth wiped out had a handful of terrible decades for asset returns that virtually destroyed them financially. Two of the great developed countries— Germany and Japan, which at times one easily could have bet on as being winners—had virtually all their wealth and many lives destroyed in the World Wars. I saw that many other countries had similar results. The US and the UK (and a few others) were the uniquely successful cases, but even they experienced periods of great wealth destruction.

If I hadn’t looked at these returns in the period before the new world order began in 1945, I wouldn’t have seen these periods of destruction. And had I not looked back 500 years around the world, I wouldn’t have seen that this has happened repeatedly almost everywhere.

The numbers shown in this table are annualized real retur...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/investing-light-big-cycle-ray-dalio-lpe8e/