The best thing about the stock market is its predictability. The worst thing about the stock market is its predictability. In the short term, the stock market is predictably unpredictable. Anyone who tells you that they know how a stock will perform in a week, in a month or even in a year is either naive or disingenuous. We might want to believe that we know how our shares will perform in the short term. But the market has a habit of making us look foolish. In the long term, however, stock markets can be surprisingly predictable. In the US, the average return from shares over the past 50 years has been around 9% a year. How is that possible when we consider all that has happened in the last half century…. …. Vietnam War (1975), Black Monday (1987), Tiananmen Square (1989), Gulf War (1991), Asian Financial Crisis (1997), dot.com bubble (2000), 9/11 (2001), Great Financial Crisis (2007), and the mother of all setbacks,...