1982 all over again?

[NW-Bound]

ERD50, try the following.

Select the checkmark in the sentence "optionally provide data and formulas in a spreadsheet format, using 2000 as the starting retirement year".

Then, in the result page, click on "download spreadsheet". You will see that because FIRECalc data only goes to 2010, the latest 30-yr result it can give you is the cycle starting in 1980, and that's what it gives you. It's not the 2000 starting point that you ask for, which of course extends into the future.

Darn! We almost discovered a future machine to let us rule the stock exchanges between the two of us.

 

[NW-Bound]

I need to add that when I presented numbers that extend to Jan 2013, they were not from FIRECalc. For numbers up to 2010, FIRECalc agrees reasonably with other simulators.

 

[NW-Bound]

A poster sent me a PM, saying that I appeared to time the market well in the 2008-2009 stock rout. Perhaps I unintentionally gave that impression, but I did not think I was that good.

If I were smarter, in 2006-2007, I would have noticed that the profits of the finance sector were not sustainable, and that the S&P became too heavily weighted in this sector, not too different than it being overweighted in tech stocks in 2000. Around that time, Bogle mentioned this financial effect in a talk, but as he preached indexing, I guess he could not contradict himself to tell people to get out, at least of the finance sector. Oh, the dividends they were paying were so juicy too.

I read plenty of articles warning about CDO and CDS in late 2007, but the market seemed to hold up, and I would feel foolish to jump ship while people were still dancing on the deck.

Anyway, in 2008 when things started to unravel, as I owned individual stocks, I saw some internal things that were a lot worse than if one looked at just the S&P. While the S&P bottomed out at 55% of its peak in 2007, many sectors outside of finance tumbled pretty bad. The stocks that held up well were consumer staples, and nearly everything else got pummeled. In the 3rd quarter of 2008, copper price dropped hard, and as this metal is ubiquitous in housing and all industrial manufacturing, this was very bad. That was when I started to sell.

So, why did I start to load up in early 2009? Just a gamble, really. I saw some non-finance stocks that I sold earlier dropped to 1/10 of their earlier value. So I started to buy. Bargain hunting. Just luck and some guts, that's all.