I still am not good at posting images. But look at the market over 100 years. You can’t even see the 1929 crash.
Understood..but the point I was trying to make, regardless of whether you can see the 1929 crash relative to the growth of the market over the past 100 years is that markets can, and do, drop and stay “underwater” for very long periods of time - often 10+ years or more.
The 1929 crash took 25 years for the DJIA to get back to the same level - ie: to “recover” from the crash.
Some may have 25 years to recover from the next crash. Others, especially those in retirement with shorter timeframes should be aware of the risk that equities involve..and it’s been my experience that there’s pretty widespread expectations out there that markets “always come back quickly” (as in, a year or three at most) - and that is most definitely not the case..
US equity markets do seem extremely jittery at the moment..just look at today. A small uptick (literally less than 1/10th of 1%) in the 10-year T-Bill, and we dropped 500 points on the Dow, 2+% on the S&P and 3+% on the NAS.
Might be time (especially for those with a need to reduce risk or shorter investment timelines) to lock in some profits. US markets are massively over-priced by any measure, and the balloon IMHO is eventually going to pop. Whether today is the start of it or it starts in 2021 or 2022 is hard to say..but it’s almost certainly coming, especially with the lunatics “in charge” of the US economy at present.