I like pictures.

You always hear the stock market averages blahblahblah and that it is a long term investment, etc. But the pictures make it nice and clear what they mean by long term. I also like the juxtaposition of the various lengths of investment as it really lets you see what you’re getting yourself into.

One thing that would be interesting, and extremely pertinent, to see would be the type of return you can expect starting with some base amount and adding a standard amount each month/year…since this is what happens most typically to people. This will obviously vary from the above graphs because only a portion of the money will have been invested for 30 years, the rest for decreasing length of time.

It would be interesting to see the “long-term” effects of this dollar-cost averaging and incremental investment

This reminds me of the old saying that goes something like;

“Time IN the market is more important than TIMING the market”

I think the graphs make that point rather well.