Wow Nostra and SD-R, are you saying that we should get out of stocks ASAP?
History is a wonderful teacher, and people ignore it at their peril. Thanks for sharing the graph.
In addition to crash periods depicted (Great Depression, 1973 oil shock, dot-com), would you consider a period such as 1965-1982?
The Dow fluctuated around 1000 all those 17 years. Only in 1982 we passed that level for good. Could we have another 15-20 years where the Dow dances up and down the 6500 or 7000 mark without making much progress?
We could buy dividend-paying stocks every time the market dips (or appears to dip). History also shows that dividends dropped far less than stock prices during the Great Depression. Of course, there’s no guarantee that dividends won’t be decimated this time around (witness GE dividend cut from $1.24 to $0.40 in Feb 2009).
