I was there during the crypto-bubble, the housing market bubble, but I don’t have any memory of the internet/dotcom bubble, and I was not alive during the rail-road bubble.
However, I want to know what the thoughts of the people were during that time. During AI, that fact that it’s a bubble is more apparent but during the housing and dotcom, I feel like it was more subtle (or I am too naive).
Does anyone have any personal experience of what it was like at that time? Were people as skeptical as they are today? What were they right/wrong about? Were the attitudes different? What changed after the crash?
The last few bubbles completely wiped out people who had 401k accounts. They were absolutely devastated, but if they stayed in, it rebuilt with interest… just in time to be wiped out when the next bubble pops.
It will happen again. Folks that have money in the stock market right now will be jumping off buildings in the next few years.
That’s why I have a significant chunk of my little personal wealth in fixed deposit. The market is too wacky for the little guys to make any money.
Especially if they never invest it…
40 years (what I would call typical number of wage earning years) is a long time to sit on the sidelines. If one starts investing early, it’s basically impossible to be in the negative by retirement. Nothing even remotely like that ever happened, at least in modern times.
I never understand why people think that the stock market down 20% year over year is a life changing disaster.
“Wiped out” just has no meaning anymore. In the absolute worst case if you bought and sold on the worst days imaginable, you were down around 50% for the last two crashes. That is not “wiped out”.
It is much more likely that the person bought the sock at least a year prior to the crash, in which case they would actually be net positive at the bottom.
Just don’t invest money you need it 5 years and ignore the catastrophizing.