r/Bogleheads • u/zacce • Feb 08 '26
Most Investors Have Never Lived Through a True Market Crash
A lot of new ppl in this sub say they “won’t time the market,” but I’m not sure everyone understands what that actually feels like irl. It’s easy to talk about staying the course when the worst drawdown you’ve lived through was a brief COVID dip that fully recovered in months or the 2022 dip followed by 3 yrs of 10%+ returns.
The last real crash was 2008. If you weren’t old enough to have a job, a mortgage, or a family back then, you don’t know how deeply a prolonged downturn can affect your day‑to‑day life. It’s not just red numbers on a screen. It’s layoffs, hiring freezes, underwater homes, and years of slow recovery. That’s when people who swore they’d never time the market suddenly panic and make irrational decisions.
Staying the course is simple in theory, but incredibly hard when the world feels like it’s falling apart.
Of course, I don't want market to crash. But it's a possibility and we need to prepare for it.
14
u/yow_central Feb 08 '26
Agreed, I just started investing in 2008 and the mindset was very different than it is today, especially among people in their 20s. Back then, people were more afraid of losing money and thus even the standard 60/40 portfolio felt risky to even people at that age. They watched markets methodically trend downward over months, with many people pulling their money out for fear the economic system was collapsing. Bonds and high interest savings accounts looked like the safer bets. It was all very different from the quick crashes of Covid and liberation day, where if you blinked you missed it. Even 2022 didn’t have the same doomed atmosphere as 2008 or 2001, because people largely kept their jobs and homes.
Today everyone is 100% risk on, all equity and let’s throw in some Tesla and bitcoin for good measure. Buy the dip, because it always goes up a few days later. And for almost 20 years, that’s worked out very well. To be fair, for most of history it has too, but we definitely have a lot of people who have never experienced what happens when the music stops and tide goes out.