buddtholomew wrote: ↑Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:50 am
I wonder if there is another asset that has performed as poorly in the entire world over that timeframe.
Not a joke!
Not that SPECIFIC timeframe, but the answer to your question is: stocks!!!
In October 1965, the DJIA was 7,668. After that stocks slid until the nadir in August 1982, when it was 2,320. That's a
17 year losing streak, with a loss of almost 70% in that time. OUCH. And oh by the way that's nominal. Real losses would have been much worse.
The next time the DJIA got to the 1965 value was July 1995. That's
30 years of flat stocks, with returns no more than the dividends (~2% at best).
Lest you think that was a one-time thing, stocks did it again in our investing lifetimes. The DJIA in January 2000 was 16,301. The next time that level was reached was May 2013. That's
13 years of stocks returning no more than dividends.
And then there's the first half of the 20th century. Except for the bubblicious peak of 5,056 in 1929, the DJIA wallowed starting from its prior peak of 2,421 in 1915 until it finally regained that level (2,467) in February 1951. That's
36 years of flat stock performance.
All these events occurred for different reasons, which (IMHO) makes the phenomenon a fairly robust one that is likely to recur. So does 7 years of crappy gold performance look so bad, really? Or, do you think there are fundamental reasons why scenarios like the above can't happen again?
This is what makes me nervous about PP variants like the Golden Butterfly that are stock-heavy and backtest well because of what the stock market has been doing since 1982. I've been plenty tempted by it myself, but considerations like the above keep stopping me.