Jason Zweig

You know, you sat in front of your black and white TV and you spent your monthly pension check and you lived a good life.

You had the American dream come true.

In fact, the good old days were kind of bad.

Or maybe another way of putting it is the good old days never were.

If a whole bunch of people are investing to insure themselves against the risk that they'll run out of money and they're putting their money in the stock market, it makes very good sense to remember that

The New York Stock Exchange originated at a place called the Tontine Coffee House.

It shows how inextricably linked

These two ideas are the idea that retirement is an insurance policy against risk and it's pooled with lots of people.

And that is inextricably linked to the stock market.

It just is.

It is somewhat of a gamble.

There's a common belief that if you hold stocks long enough, you're effectively guaranteed a robust positive return.

And both statistically and historically, it's not really true.

I hope, and this is the gamble that I'm taking and everyone knows,

Invested in the stock market is taking it with me.

I hope that the stock market will perform great over the next few decades so that the money I have invested in it for my retirement will continue to grow.

But there's no guarantee of that.

Yes, I'm Jason Zweig, and I write the Intelligent Investor column for The Wall Street Journal.

Oh, that's a great question, Ryan.

So I often hear from readers that I'm stupid, so let's take it head on.