Valuethinker wrote:But also 1929-1939 in USA (the rallies were followed by spectacular busts, I think the actual bottom was 1941?)...
One table of "declines" (from the SBBI yearbook--objective in the sense that I didn't pick the dates) basically gives it as two back-to-back seven-year bear markets:
Peak Aug 1929, Trough May 1932, Decline 79.00%, Recovery Nov. 1936
Peak Feb 1937, Trough March 1938, Decline 49.93%, Recovery Feb. 1945.
1935 and 1936 was two of the best years in stock market history, with a returns of 47.7% and 33.9% respectively. As you see, the crash in 1937 was about the same magnitude and lasted longer than 2008-2009 and yet it's almost completely forgotten because of having been preceded by a worse one.
I can't even imagine what it must have felt like in 1937, just thinking you were finally out of the woods and then getting clobbered again.
Think of 1929-1945 the next time someone tells you that the "average length of a bear market" is some small number of years. Yeah,
because 1929-1945 gets counted as two 7-year bear markets, and just a few percent less in 1936 and it would count as a single 15-year bear market.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.