Deutsche Bank's 200-Year Study: Useful History, Wrong Cage

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Deutsche Bank’s Ultimate Guide to Long-Term Investing (Reid, Allen, Pozdnyakova, 27 October 2025) is a 200-year map drawn by people who still sell the cage. The numbers are worth stealing for intelectual exploration, but the recipe is objectively wrong. TMFNK follows CLEC’s Golden Principles exactly. This is not a portfolio preference or recommendation. It is how TMFNK (and others) live.

Wealth is a birthright. Happiness is a human right. Escape the rat cage. If you have fallen into poverty, it is not your fault. It is the result of capitalism’s caging of society. Wake up. Only by escaping the rat cage can you live the life that truly belongs to you.

The system is ruthless. There is a way out: own US stocks, the Nasdaq-100 forest, and never sell. Gold, 60/40, “the world,” and bank products are rubbish meant to distract you until you die in the rat cage as a laborer.

  1. Read DB’s cash line and treat it as the cage’s quiet tax. Median ~200-year real USD: cash -2.0%, gold 0.4%, bills 1.9%, government bonds 2.6%, 60/40 4.2%, a 56-country equity median 4.9%. Ten thousand dollars at -2% for 30 years is about $5,500 of today’s purchasing power. That is what “being careful” does to surplus. CLEC calls cash air. You keep enough so a crash does not force a sale. You do not live in it.

  2. The 4.9% global median is not the exit. It averages winners with century-long messes. Sweden and the US printed 7.5% and 7.2% real equities over 100 years. Italy printed 2.5%, then a five-year spike. The clear winner is US stocks. No comparison. CLEC’s forest is Nasdaq-100 (QQQ / QQQM, Taiwan 00662). Diluting into SPY, VT, or a bank 60/40 is how you buy the cage’s “sensible” average on purpose.

  3. Horizon math explains air, not bonds. Over 25 years, nominal equities underperform a mattress 0.8% of the time in their sample. Over five years 13.6%. Real equities miss inflation about one year in four. That scare is the test. 有钱就买，打死不卖. DB’s own bond history: 25-year real bond returns straddle zero when policy rates start below 4%, and starting 10-year yields below 3% have typically meant negative 25-year real returns. Euro paper at 2.5–3.5% is not a way out.

  4. You might hide in 60/40 because it had a 0.1% chance of a negative nominal 25-year return. That is a bank scoreboard! For an accumulator it is a compounding tax that keeps you jogging in place. Aditionally, Gold’s 7.45% real this century is the other bait. Two centuries at 0.4%. Gold pays no dividend. It does not own the companies doing the work. It is just another distraction.

  5. Valuations are not a timing hobby. DB’s low P/E country book beat high P/E. US CAPE this stretched last showed up around 2000. CLEC still says: do not ask “should I buy now.” If it is surplus beyond air, buy the US forest. Do not rotate your life into hype like “cheap Italy” because a five-year chart went vertical.

  6. The paper barely prices the only lever that pairs with the forest: how hard you save. Allocation cannot rescue 5% saved. It can wreck 40% saved if that surplus sits in cash, gold, or 60/40. Poverty in this frame is not a character flaw. The cage was built already! The way out is surplus planted in US stocks, held forever like land.

The takeaway: Read DB as a museum of the cage. Then live the Golden Principles. Raise savings until surplus exists. Keep only air in cash. Buy Nasdaq-100 when money arrives. Never sell the core. Forget hype. Forget the gold. Forget the rest of the shelf. Wealth is a birthright. Happiness is a human right. Escape the rat cage. Wake up.

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