Mike, that's great stuff. I enjoyed reading it the first time you posted the link a few months back, and it was worth the re-read.
One particularly cheery note:
<<For both Switzerland and the United Kingdom, the 1929 peak was more in the nature of a double top than a rally within a downtrend. The London stock market was in a secular bear market from 1900 until 1921, andeven though the market rallied strongly in the 1920s, it still failed to overtake the 1900 highs. From a longer term perspective, this recovery is less impressive. The Global Financial Index of British stocks, which uses the FT-A base of April 10, 1962 = 100, recorded a high of 155.61 during the South Sea Bubble in June 1720. It wasn't until July 1968 that the All-Share index finally broke through the old high of 1720. In other words, someone who had bought stocks at the top of the South Sea Bubble would have had to wait 250 years to get their principal back and not suffer a capital loss. Of course, dividends, not capital gains, would have returned shareholders' investment long before 1968, but this should remind those investors that stocks do not always go up.>> |
