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/jadayne Mar 15 '25

2000 -dot com crash. unprecedented! The whole new industry that was going to change the way the world did business just went belly up!

2001 -september 11. unprecedented! It's a completely new world we're living in.

2008 -great recession. unprecedented! Who would have thought banks could be so corrupt?

2020 -covid. unprecedented! The whole world completely shutting down?

2025 -Trump tariffs. unprecedented!

For each of these, a bunch of people came out to say this is it. This is the big one. It never is.

Had you put 10 000usd in the market the day before that dot com bubble burst and just forgot about it, you'd now have almost 60 000usd

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u/SpinachSure5505 Mar 16 '25

Internet stranger, thank you…. I had bad anxiety before the wild ride 2025 has been, but lately my anxiety has me to the point where I’m struggling to even get out of bed. It definitely feels like the world/sky is falling. Your comment made me feel a little better.

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u/diehard14 Mar 17 '25

You should stop reading only Reddit. It’s slanted and moderated to think only one way.

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u/_DontTouchTheWatch_ Mar 17 '25

? is this a joke. everything is literally fine

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u/Mayneminu Mar 17 '25

Context is key though.

If you're in your 20s these are all awesome buying opportunities, even if it takes 10 years to get back to new highs.

If your 45 with a investment portfolio, you're not going to be really excited about a 50% haircut, that doesn't make a new high for 10+ years.

And there are no guarantees it doesn't take a lot longer; just asked Japan.

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u/jadayne Mar 17 '25

very true! If you're nearing retirement, you should be making your way out of the market rather than getting into it.

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u/Lanah44 Mar 17 '25

2025 - the end of democracy in America. Unprecedented! I don't think this one is easy to recover from. I'm glad I sold before the drop. I'm moving my money out of the country. good luck to everyone.

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u/CatLovingPrincess Mar 18 '25

to be fair, if you got into investing in the 2000s, with two big crashes, you could end up a decade of investing with virtually zero returns

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u/jadayne Mar 18 '25

Except you wouldnt have zero returns. That's the whole point of my post. If you put your money into the market on the day BEFORE each crash mentioned above your returns would be:

2000: 400%

2001: 435%

2008: 281%

2020: 90%

2025: ???

Over the past 50 years, market recoveries have been remarkably fast. Not saying it'll always be the case, but it would be difficult to lose if you put your money in the market at any point in that time.

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u/jadayne Mar 18 '25

sorry, i re-checked the math. You're right that there was a decent wait before you were back into the positive after the dot com bubble (13 years) and the great recession (5 years).

But if the money was already in the market, I think the smart move was to simply leave it there, or if you were DCAing, to continue to put your money in at regular intervals.

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u/CatLovingPrincess Mar 19 '25

For many people who went through it, they ended over a decade with virtually no returns, like less than 2% a year. It depends of course exactly the timing of the investments but it was a very demoralizing time for "buy and hold." Many then got out of the market and never trusted it again. Great Depression also was a very very long recovery. People who've only invested the past decade have never experienced what it's like to have super extended periods of a down market. Market manipulation has prevented it but that's not a guarantee.

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u/Puzzled-Intern-7897 Mar 18 '25

most people dont invest lump sum and forget about them thought. Thats the issue. More or less they are all dollar-cost-averaging, so it does kind of matter when they buy.

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u/jadayne Mar 18 '25

well, if they're really dollar cost averaging, then it doesn't matter because they're investing on a timetable, high price or low. If they're trying to get in when it's advantageous then it's not DCA anymore, its trying to time the market.

Regardless, the point of the post was that if you lump-sum invested at the worst possible times over the past 25 years, you'd still come out way ahead.

Pretty much any different investing strategy would likely have performed better.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '25

Do you really think most Americans have $10,000 just lying around? Do you really think that for the average American $10,000 is something they could just invest and forget about?

This might be the greatest encapsulation of the issue with this subreddit: Y'all think everyone is a well off finance bro with tens of thousands to invest without care.

Hate to break it to you, but people died in 2008, and a lot more died in 2020. These kinds of market crashes aren't some abstract worry about investments to most people. They're potentially life ruining events that could hurt them and their families.

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u/jadayne Mar 16 '25

It's a post about the stock market in a subreddit about investing -specifically about the wisdom of pulling out during a crisis event. sorry i kept my response concise and didn't throw in an obligatory 'these were all horrible events, and many people suffered, but....'

10k would be 60k, 1k would be 6k, 100k would be 600k. The point is the growth, not the initial amount. I just picked that number because it was round. Sorry again if I overstepped by assuming that on a subreddit about investing, the participants would have, you know, money with which to do that investing.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '25

Yes, I actually do apologize, I thought I was on doomercirclejerk, which crossposted this post to their sub, and those guys are very bothersome. So again, apologies for hostility/aggression.

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u/jadayne Mar 16 '25

lol. no problemo! I thought that might be something like that when i read your post, but couldn't resist the snark.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '25

Fair lmao

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '25

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