Today’s chart comes from Wealthmanagement.com. It shows the drawdowns, which is the percent the market is down from the previous record high, going back to 1970. As you would expect, the chart shows most the time the market is “down” and investors spend a lot of time having “lost” money.
However, we also know that during this time the cumulative return has been an incredible 18,750%, which works out to an annual return of 10.4%.
As the great Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, said, “The mistakes we make as investors is when the market’s going up, we think it’s going to go up forever. When the market goes down, we think it’s going to go down forever. Neither of those things actually happen.”