10 • MARTIN H. RUBY
what? Dart funds were making good money! Everything was mak- ing good money. The market was going up, up, up. We all know what happened after the feel-good years of the 90s: the dot-com bubble burst. If you’re like me and the majority of Americans, for the last two decades, you’ve been riding the mar- ket roller coaster as we recover and then crash again. The 2000s started low: From March of 2000 to October of 2002, the NASDAQ lost 78 percent of its value. The S&P 500®, which is an index that economists often use to measure the overall health of the stock market, fell by nearly 40 percent. In a series of months, many people’s retirement accounts were severely de- pleted. A running joke at the time was that 401(k)s had been re- duced to 201(k)s. 6, 7 The good news is, the market didn’t stay down. From 2002 to 2008, the market recovered. Those were okay years. Most of us were trying to earn back what we had lost in our retirement ac- counts. The market was helping us along. Then the real estate bubble burst in 2008 and sent the market crashing again. Today, the market has recovered. In fact, the S&P 500® is hov- ering around all-time highs. And, as any financial advisor will tell you, if you rode the wave, you’ve come out on top. If you didn’t get scared and sell when the market was down, if you didn’t panic and buy when the market was high, if you just stayed the course, you slowly recovered. Recently, we've watched volatility return to the market. Most experts, including myself, believe the next big crash isn't a ques- tion of if but when. But I’m not here to scare you with talks of the next great crash. Instead, I’m here to help you evaluate what a
6 Multpl.com. March 13, 2018. “S&P 500 Historical Prices by Year.” http: // www.multpl.com / s-p-500-historical-prices / table / by-year. 7 Investing.com. March 13, 2018. “NASDAQ Composite Historical Data.” https: // www.investing.com / indices / nasdaq-composite-historical-data.
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