Imagine a world where these customers ran out of the store whenever the merchandise was put on sale. They ran screaming to their cars, saying they needed to go home and return their previous purchases, now at a much lower price, because the cost of DVD players was falling! You would likely mumble something about these "idiots" as you fought the crowd to get into the store to buy everything you could, while prices were low. As soon as things stabilized, you know you could likely put them up on eBay for a tidy profit.
Yet, this bizarre scenario is what plays out nearly every single time we have a market crash. Since I began writing my investment articles ten years ago, we have lived through at least two major stock crashes (the post-September 11th low and the credit crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers).
Each and every time the stock market or the bond market goes south, which is an inevitability in life (peaks and valleys are more common than a constant, upward trend), you have heard tales of ordinary investors dumping their 401(k) holdings, selling off their Roth IRA investments, and moving everything to cash. In fact, during the worst of the market crash between 2008 and 2010, so many investors were parking money in Treasury bills instead of taking advantage of the low prices available on stocks and corporate bonds that there was an actual moment in time when Treasurys were yielding a negative return - meaning you were guaranteed to lose money - and investors were still buying them as quickly as they could, so great was the fear and panic.
Here is an unfortunate truth: If the American stock market becomes worthless, you won't have a job. If you are decades away from retirement, do you really think that the United States as a whole will be worth less money thirty or forty years from now? Seriously? I don't believe that. The Internet in its current form barely existed twenty years ago and yet now represents a substantial portion of our overall economy. Technology and innovation will continue to transform business and nations.
That means that if you are smart enough to know you don't know how to invest and put your money into a low-cost index fund that buys the biggest companies in the nation, such as the Spartan 500 fund by Fidelity, you take advantage of matching funds by your employers on any 401(k) contributions, and you dollar cost average so that you are buying constantly to average out the price you pay for your shares, history has shown that you are statistically likely to do very well over several decades. A twenty year old who was unfortunate enough to invest at the height of the Great Depression in 1929 would have recovered far sooner if he or she were constantly buying stock during the collapse because their cost basis was so much lower.
After all, don't you wish your great-grandparents had bought shares of Coca-Cola during the Great Depression? With dividends reinvested, every $19 back then is now worth more than $5,000,000 today.
