Aren't you forgetting the dividends? According to [1], if you reinvested the dividends in the DJIA, you would end up with $3 billion instead of $10 million.

[1] https://dqydj.com/dow-jones-return-calculator/

My uncle is crazy, but not stupid (he has a PHD in physics) so, who knows :) Chuckle.

Getting a PhD means you went to a lot of school. You can still be stupid.

One more sort of funny thing about uncle Bernie, he worked for a very highly respected aerospace company for 40 years developing all kinds of crazy things. When he retired, he was the only one who knew how to make a very specific type of klystron tube. The DoD still orders about one or two of them a year which keeps him quite well off since each tube is well into the six figure territory! He bought all the equipment when he retired and makes about 2 or 3 tubes a year on a quonset hut on the farm. Kind cool really. Even though I think he is a nut, I still sorta have to give him all due respect.

No disrespect to your uncle, but book smarts and common sense can absolutely be mutually exclusive.

That is sort of funny because my grandpa used to say, there are two types of "learnin" book learnin and the other type of learnin (droping the g's is how he spoke). Just funny, but probably true, but on the other hand ole uncle Bernie may still have the last laugh on all of us, who knows.

Yep, but I suppose much of the growth of the coins' value is a bump at the end, whereas the stock grows quietly ?

That is probably correct, I don't have any way of evaluating their collectible value as a time series. My response was half serious and half joke, when people discover large caches of currency, someone often pipes up "Gee but if they had put it into the stock market ..." which over long enough times is often (as in this case) no better than simply the intrinsic collectible value of the currency. Of course some currency has no "value" at all, I've got some East German Marks for example which you certainly can't take to your local currency exchange booth and get local currency for them. But I did have an offer from a coin collector which was more than their face value in equivalent Euros.

For the same reason I think a gold coin makes an excellent college graduation gift. For me it embodies the essence of the value of a college degree, on the one hand it has a 'face value', on the other it has a 'value in trade', and on the third hand it has value as an industrial ingredient in various products. It really captures the economic notion of value versus cost. And I see a college degree in the same way.

And the final bit, there was a comedian who once joked that as a kid they put all their money in a savings account to save for the future, but now realized that if they had just kept their toys in good shape I could have resold them in their golden years for a fortune!

+1 for the great story