How safe is the stock market?

[mtgordon]

I agree that for an average investor they should have a less volatile distribution. However this is primarily a poker forum and I think that the people on the boards have a higher tolerance for risk (or maybe it's just me) than the average person. We also have a better understanding of EV and desire to push that as much as we can.

Also the posters on this website tend to be younger than the average investor. Therefore we have a longer time period to invest over. However I realize that these things are not true for every poster on this forum and it should probably be stressed more when people ask for a typical spread of funds.

To be completely honest though I haven't done a lot of looking into the variance of allocation and have mainly looked at the EV and tried to reasonably maximize that. I am at the beginning of a long hold (30-40 years) and am assuming that is the best thing for me to do.