Before you bail out of stocks -- or start to invest again -- it may be worthwhile to look closely at stock-market history. How bad can the stock market get? How long does it take for you to get even after you hit bottom? The market's history offers valuable clues.
A lot of flawed information about the extent and duration of bear markets is being disseminated today. The information is faulty -- or at least misleading -- because it fails to account for the impact of dividends when computing total returns. Let's look at the real story (the data for this article was supplied by Ibbotson Associates, a subsidiary of Morningstar, the mutual fund tracker).
We'll start with the period from 1966 through 1982 -- an era during which many experts claim the stock market went nowhere. There's a grain of truth in this assertion. The Dow Jones industrial average reached a record intraday high of 1,000 in 1966, but then meandered for years. It fell to 777 in August 1982 and didn't close for good above 1,000 until December of that year. The implication, of course, is that the typical stock-market investor earned nothing over that lengthy period.
But that calculation omits dividends. In fact, Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, the benchmark that most professionals prefer when discussing performance, returned an annualized 6.8 percent during that 17-year period.
The S&P 500 lost 29 percent from the end of November 1968 through June 1970. But it took just nine months -- until March 1971 -- for investors who had bought stocks at the peak to break even.
The 1973-74 selloff was one of the three worst bear markets since the Great Depression. The market plunged 43 percent from January 1973 through September 1974. If you had invested at the precise top, you would have made all your money back by June 1976 -- less than two years after the trough.
The current decade has been far worse than the 1970s. The S&P 500 plunged 47 percent from March 24, 2000, through Oct. 9, 2002. It didn't recover until October 2006.
From the start of the current downturn on Oct. 9, 2007, through Feb. 23, the S&P 500 has tumbled 50 percent on a total-return basis. That makes this bear market the worst since the 1930s.
Indeed, this decade is already the worst in at least the past 100 years. The S&P 500 has fallen an annualized 3.6 percent since 2000. That compares with an annualized loss of 0.05 percent in the 1930s.
The bottom line is that unless we really are embarking on Great Depression II -- or something resembling it -- the worst of the decline is certainly behind us. I think we've already had our "lost decade."
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