Investing

This repository, owned by the user zonination (Zoni Nation), presents a data visualization and analysis project on long-term returns from broad stock market indexes, especially the S&P 500. The author gathers historical price data (adjusted for inflation and dividends) and computes growth trajectories under a “buy and hold” strategy over decades. The key insight illustrated is that over sufficiently long holding periods (e.g. 40 years), the stock market stabilizes and nearly always yields positive returns, even accounting for extreme market crashes and recessions. The visualizations show “return curves” for different starting years and durations, and also illustrate the probability of losses over various time horizons. The project is centered on transparency in finance and encourages users to examine the data themselves; the code is shared in R and uses ggplot2 for plotting.