"...Each received $2,000 at the beginning of every year for the 20 years ending in 2022 and left the money in the stock market..."
All of the experiment "participants" must have Lucky in their middle names. They managed to keep their jobs over those 20 years and kept their cool at the economy downturns.
They only Buy (the index shares), except for the one that keeps "cash" aka money market shares. I guess they plan on doing this beyond the 20y, why stop feeding cash into the account, why retire when it can contnue growing?
Lucky ones will also retire in upturn.
Yet the whole transaction needs the Sell part to realize the gains. Surprisingly, the Schwab experiment did not model this for the "participants".
Does one need to "time" the Sells?