And your point on diversification is well taken. I think most of us here (except Wab) advocate spreading your money in U.S. Stocks and Bonds, In different asset classes and International Funds also.
Sure, we always have some different scary monsters around.
Back in '81 we had runaway inflation, high interest rates, a "reasonable" enemy with nuclear weapons, and various threats of war.
Today we have artificially lowered inflation reports, inflation rates you cant make any money on, unreasonable enemies that might have nuclear weapons, and various threats of war.
But in '81 we were not far removed from a long sideways period. Hence one could expect better times in the market. We were also only 30 years removed from the maturation of our market from developed to stable/mature.
But you did take away my fundamental message that allocating into one or two US based asset classes may not be a very good idea.
Oh yeah, the other thing about historical data stuff? Not only are many of the periods not particularly relevant to todays political, financial and cultural conditions...the ones that are relevant usually arent included as full term periods in our calculations. For example, if you do a 30 year run (typical), the series starting in 1974 arent complete and dont give a full test of safety.
If you only consider full series runs of 30 years, and only the most recent of those to maintain some coherency with modern times, then perhaps only the runs from 1950-1974 are really worthwhile in calculating.
If you run firecalc with the default settings, it gives you a 93.2% chance of success across all series. Looking just at the full runs from 1950 through 1974 shows 6 failed series out of 25...about a 75% chance of success.
If you decide that the 50's and even the early 60's are still too old to be fair comparisons, isolating the runs from 1965-1974 produce 6 failures out of 10...a 40% success rate.
You're now scowling at me and saying that one could data-mine to produce any results you want.
Just like starting with a data series post civil war and ending 30 years ago...
The other point is we have historically had several strong market periods. The ~20 year one ending in 1929 with a crash and a long downward trend. The ~20 year one from ~1945 that ended with a long sideways trend. And the ~20 year one from 1980-2000...
Anyone seeing a trend...?
My only question is "is it going to be a crash or a sideways period"...?