I lived through the dotcom bust, the financial crisis and now this. Long term it isn’t going to be any worse than they were. In 2-3 years we will be recovering. I feel bad for people who can’t wait out a market cycle, but that’s what this is, somewhat exacerbated by the Fed’s actions leading up to this point.
I get your point that everything always goes up eventually, but there will be unpredictable events that reshape the market like COVID, war, 9/11, hurricanes, and many other “one-time” events that we can’t even predict right now. Just because these things kind of happened at different times doesn’t mean 10 of these things won’t happen all at the exact same time or back to back for many years. Imagine having a COVID lockdown, on top of a fuel shortage, and a food shortage, on top of a war, on top of countries defaulting on debt. If even any two of those happened in lockstep it would spell disaster for many company’s as we know. We got lucky there wasn’t another major crisis during COVID lockdowns although to this day we are dealing with the supply chain issues created with strict lockdowns and China is still or really just starting now to lock down in a major way, so now the supply chain issues we had aren’t just on our side of the ocean but theirs as well. It’s a miracle it didn’t happen on both sides at the same time.
I believe it was ~13 years before the nasdaq reached the same level as the peak of the dot com bubble. I also find it odd to use the peak as the primary reference point. It was a brief moment in time. For example, if you had invested in the nasdaq in Feb 99 or Nov 2001, instead of Nov 99, it recovered in 7 years. If you started in Aug 98 it recovered in ~5 years. There was rough a window of a year where it would have been really bad to invest, but that is why everyone recommends dollar-cost-averaging (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dollarcostaveraging.asp) instead of investing a ton all at once.
Ya'll are talking past each other. Since I made the comment, I will define my terms more precisely. In 2-3 years someone who consistently invests a fixed portion of their earnings/assets into a weighted vehicle/basket will be enjoying an appreciating net worth. I'm not claiming to be able to call the bottom, but I'm also not measuring "recovering" as peak-to-peak. Peak to peak would be past-tense "recovered".
Has the “pace of technology” really picked up in the last 10 years though?
In 2012:
- Apple and Google were the dominant mobile platforms
- Microsoft was dominant on the desktop
- Amazon was the dominant retailer and the dominant (but nascent cloud provider)
- Google was the dominant search engine and YouTube was dominant
- Facebook was the dominant social network
-Microsoft has been one of the top five companies by market cap since 2000 and Apple has been in the top 5 since 2011.
- Intel is still the top PC processor manufacturer.
If you saw a modern smart phone in 2022, would you really be impressed with the iPhone 12 ProMax compared to the iPhone 5s?
I was using a 2 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell with 8GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 (not a typo) screen. That computer can still run the latest version of Office and Chrome today.
In other words, the landscape hasn’t changed that much.
Now compare 2012-2002.
Have there been any new widely successful tech companies emerging since Facebook in 2009?
Amazon. AWS was just a small cloud on the horizon in 2012. They are the dominant platform to run applications and (more surprisingly) now the #2 DBMS vendor according to recent Gartner numbers. That's a major change. [0]
