&gt; You don&#x27;t know if the future will be like the past.  (...)  But somehow investors are almost blind to everything other than recent return.<p>Maybe because I come from the &quot;wrong&quot; side of the Berlin Wall, but as a guy who was only a kid when he saw a thing that was supposed to last forever (i.e. Communism) fall to pieces in less than a year it always surprises me when I see these predictions made for 20-30-40 years in the future, all promising a 5% or 7% return like there won&#x27;t be any new World War, any new nationalizations on a continental scale (see Russia after 1917 or China after 1945) or no new Spanish Flu.