Counterpoint. Your money is going to lose value to inflation and commodities are speculative and don’t have a labor force working for you. Invest in CDs if you are wary of using stocks/ETFs/options

“Should not be” in an abstract sense, sure. In cold reality, I don’t see what other strategy someone has to actually retire. Safer investments don’t have anywhere near the same returns.

My 401k balance disagrees with you.

The system is deeply flawed but I’m still going to retire with several hundred thousand dollars more than I would have if I had just put that money in savings.

Don’t let idealism blind you to reality on decisions that have such far reaching consequences for your life. Put your money in index funds and vote for people who say they will improve the system.

Ypu sre right in that the stock market, especially the US stock market, is a cluster fuck.

But it’s a cluster fuck that mostly goes up, with solid returns over the last 10-20 years in index funds. I’m not going to cut my nose to spite my face on that, especially when the populous alternatives, like being a landlord, tend to have serious ethical concerns.

For examples of why the market is fucked, something your argument clearly lacked, the biggest indicator for me is that news of large buys/saells tend to move the market much more than the actual buy/sale.

(Personal theory, derivatives pretty much control the market, and a buy/sell doesn’t interact with calls/puts typically, but the news of a sale gets people to interact with calls/puts)

Yeah, it’s kinda hard to tell if this is unpopular or not on the surface, because it’s not exactly a rare opinion, and it’s one that’s shared by a shit ton of people. But it’s definitely an opinion that draws a shit ton of heat because it goes right to the heart of realism vs idealism. Three should part looks like it’s only about the current system because you focussed on the stock market, despite the fix for your should being systemic rather than specific.

The way the system currently works, it’s necessary, and should be part of a retirement fund.

But the current system sucks, and we should have robust funding in place to take care of each other as we age out of work. And that goes for other forms of retirement like disability.

I think that your post deserves an upvote as unpopular because what you’re talking about is fundamentally shifting the economic model towards a more socialist way of handling the safety net. That is distinctly unpopular in a lot of the world, and particularly unpopular in capitalist nations.

Now, ignoring the C/ that we’re in and the question of popularity, there is the middle ground solution of improving oversight and regulation of the market which would take the reins of power into the hands of the government. The flaw in that is in it being in the hands of governments, but that’s a flaw in any social safety net that exists stay anyway.

I err on the side of formal programs with tight regulations on reducing them that are funded by the populous and heavy taxation on wealth and capitalist actions, if we’re going to stay capitalist rather than entirely upending the system as it is. But I’d prefer the system itself to change.