My goal was to use Firecalc to find out the longest it ever took the market to recover from a downturn. So I did the following:
1. used all the default settings on all the FireCalc tabs. The only fields I touched were the three on the main page (namely, spending, portfolio, and years)
2. Entered a portfolio of $1M, spending of $0, and time of 1 year
3. Ran Firecalc and looked at the results to see if the worst result was under $1M (which I interpreted as "the market has not recovered after 1 year") or over $1M (which I would have interpreted as "it never took the market longer than 1 years to recover)
4. Tried again with 2 years, 3 years, etc.
I was not surprised to see that I got all the way up to 19 years without ever seeing that worst result was over $1M. I interpreted that to mean that there was at least one 19-year period where the market had not recovered a previous high it had once recorded, which is easy to believe.
The strange thing is that when I tried 20 years, the worst result was exactly $1M. Same thing when I tried 21 years, 22 years, etc.
I can't think of a sensible way to interpret that result. Is there one, or is this a Firecalc bug?
1. used all the default settings on all the FireCalc tabs. The only fields I touched were the three on the main page (namely, spending, portfolio, and years)
2. Entered a portfolio of $1M, spending of $0, and time of 1 year
3. Ran Firecalc and looked at the results to see if the worst result was under $1M (which I interpreted as "the market has not recovered after 1 year") or over $1M (which I would have interpreted as "it never took the market longer than 1 years to recover)
4. Tried again with 2 years, 3 years, etc.
I was not surprised to see that I got all the way up to 19 years without ever seeing that worst result was over $1M. I interpreted that to mean that there was at least one 19-year period where the market had not recovered a previous high it had once recorded, which is easy to believe.
The strange thing is that when I tried 20 years, the worst result was exactly $1M. Same thing when I tried 21 years, 22 years, etc.
I can't think of a sensible way to interpret that result. Is there one, or is this a Firecalc bug?