I agree with you and completely understand you, its just this is addressing the EV question. Stocks will certainly go up in time, enough to make them good investments or better alternatives to other investments is another issue. We must not forget that stocks aren't gambling or investing instruments, they are real claims against the businesses that make our economy run. As long as that economy grows, by default, stocks will grow too. Only if all the total growth in the economy was due to private individuals and companies, and not the public traded companies, could you find it possible for them not to go up. So unless you are predicting say a 30 year depression or period of zero growth, stocks simply by what they represent have to go up or else people are just total idiots. Lets not also forget that in this age of globalization and scale, companies are more and more becoming public or becoming part of public companies and its public companies that mostly have the scale and expertise to grow faster than the overall economy itself. This fact will probably drive stock prices up for quite some time above the economy's growth rate, but this is an issue that is something that has to be looked at over decades, not over the 90-day horizon it seems most investors value now.