[Rodney King]

author can wax poetic about long term, but when you invest in a company that goes bankrupt, there is no long term to consider

Right. If you buy 30 stocks and hold them for 30 years, some of them will go bankrupt. However, that does not happen for the S&P 500 because S&P boots stocks out of the S&P 500 when they are tanking. Therefore, using the S&P 500 as an indicator of long-term performance is wrong due to selection bias.

[SJackson]

Although I prefer the Dow to the S&P, they replace issues periodically as well. I didn't really take the article too seriously (or the book). About the same time John Templeton was asked how high the Dow would go, he stated definitively 100,000. To the followup question, when, in the next century.