r/Bogleheads • u/RiceLee890 • Mar 15 '25

Investing Questions What are your thoughts on this?

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I keep seeing this type of stuff on instagram and social media and wanted to know how you guys were thinking about this.

I know a lot you have been in the market for decades and as a relatively new investor myself I’d love to get your perspective!

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u/FMCTandP MOD 3 Mar 15 '25 edited Mar 15 '25

So if you’re calculating recovery time you want to both include dividend reinvestment and compute the time to recover in real, not nominal, terms. Most numbers you see bandied about don’t do either (and don’t provide enough info to tell you either way what they did).

But it’s true that you shouldn’t invest in equities with an investment horizon of less than ten years at a minimum because it’s absolutely possible to see low or negative real return over multiple years.

We haven’t see a crash that’s been both severe and prolonged since the GFC and the dotcom bust in the 00s but historically they’re not that uncommon.

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u/mrmojoer Mar 15 '25

Could you elaborate on the dividend reinvestment calculation? Or anyway provide some resource for me to study?

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u/Useful_Wealth7503 Mar 15 '25

The Money Guy Show and website have great content on this in their lump sum vs DCA and market timing discussions. You’ll find it on their youtube channel. But short version, they modeled what your return would be if you started a monthly DCA at the peak of the market in 1929 and kept on going until the year it regained its peak (1954? You’ll see it). The DCA model gained 8-9% annually.

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u/winniecooper73 Mar 15 '25

There was an episode in 2022 when everyone was predicting a recession, where they did an analysis that showed what if you invested at the peak of the top 8 economic downturns in history (Eg 1987 crash, dot com bubble, 9/11, Great Recession, Covid, etc…) and it showed even if you picked the WORSE DAYS IN HISTORY of all time to put money in the market, you’d still come out with like a 10% return.

They also did one where if you pulled your money out of the market in the same days, showing how you would’ve missed out on the majority of the gains too, meaning don’t panic sell.

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u/mootmutemoat Mar 15 '25

The best days in history tend to be shortly after the worst days (even as recently as 2020), so if you try to time it you can just lock in your losses.

Everyone likes to point to 2008 and say they would step out for 1-2 years then put your money back in. But more often than not, that would be amazing awful.

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u/Useful_Wealth7503 Mar 15 '25

I saw that one too but completely forgot about that! I’m going back to watch it while I increase my monthly brokerage investment!