Inflation Adjusted S&P 500 | Time Required to Recapture Losses | Chart of the Week
Source: officialdata.org, BMG Group Inc.
Conventional Wall Street thinking is to always stay invested. This may be an acceptable strategy for institutions, but for individual humans, you have to take life span considerations into account. From this chart you can see that the1929 bubble took 27 years just to break without considering the effects of inflation. The 1966 peak took 26 years to break even. The tech bubble in 2000 took 15 years to break even. Today since the majority of investors are Baby Boomers they likely won’t live long enough to break even.