Or just being born in Japan, and investing in shares 34y ago and waiting this month to break even on the nikkey index
People often say things like this as an argument against long term investing, but as I said earlier they often omit the dividends out of the question, and their assumption is that the person ploughed 100% of their savings in at the peak, and then never added any extra.
but let’s take a look at the Japanese chart, because it’s often used in misleading statements like “the Japanese market made no money for 34 years.
you can see in the chart that there was a huge speculative peak, followed by a crash in the Japanese market, then it stabilised, but then dropped a bit further with the 2000 tech crash, Sep 11 attacks, before recovering, but then crashing in the GFC and then starting a 15 year recovery.
But through out all that the long term trend is still up, dividends were paid, and if you dollar cost averaged throughout all the crashes over your working life you would now be sitting on a nice pile.
the second chart is the last 15 years, you can see it’s been very good returns, especially when you add back dividends.
Basicallly my point is it’s unrealistic to write off an entire market just because it had a speculative bubble in the 90’s, because it’s not likely that some one saving for their retirement would put 100% of their savings in right at the peak, they would be putting in money over 40 years, which means they would have put money in at the low levels before they peak, some at the peak, but then the bulk of it at the low levels after the crash, and then seen their balance grow exponentially over the last 15 years.
Buffett himself has been investing heavily in Japan, it’s his largest holdings outside the USA, and he has made shiploads of cash, mean while all the Simps focus on the misleading info causing them to think the Japanese market is trash.