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What I Learned From 6 Stock Market Crashes

One of America's most trusted financial journalists on investing during market highs and lows


spinner image stacked lines of sample bad news headlines about a financial crisis and stock markets falling down
iStock / Getty Images

 

When stocks collapsed in March, why were we surprised? Markets do that from time to time. This is the seventh crash I've covered as a journalist, not including several crashlets in between.

Emotionally, they've all affected investors the same way: Our breath shortens, our pulses race, and we kick ourselves for having been so optimistic about stocks the week before. Stress drives out rational thinking. We forget that, after crashes, it's too late to sell. That switching to CDs will lock in losses permanently. That the stock market, on average, has always — always! — recovered and gone higher.

Often following crashes, we run after new investment ideas that we imagine will keep us safe the next time around. Usually they don't, because, to be perfectly blunt, stocks are never safe; they're not supposed to be. But something has changed since the turn of the century: Investors have migrated toward stock index funds. Used properly, these funds can see investors through the current crash and future ones with greater stability and confidence. Before I talk about why, let's take a trip down memory lane.

50 Years of Downs & Ups

The S&P 500 Index — a common barometer of the U.S. stock market — fell 20 percent or more six times in the half century before 2020. Those bear markets, as they are typically known, averaged about 16 months.

I'll start with the Nifty Fifty of the 1960s and ‘70s. Those were 50 blue chip companies that supposedly could stand tall no matter how much you paid for shares in them. The market plunge of 1973-74 blew away that illusion. Stocks dropped 48 percent; most of the Nifties dropped further still. Some of them recovered, although at a slow pace. Investors’ infatuation with such once-mighty names as S. S. Kresge, Polaroid and Simplicity Pattern cooled.

spinner image from january nineteen seventy three to july nineteen eighty the stock market fell for twenty one months and took seventy months to recover due to conflict in the middle east
Illustrations by Nicolas Rapp

In the 1980s, corporate raiders roared into town, carving up old-line companies to deliver “shareholder value” and hot takeover stocks. Chancy enterprises found financing for their corporate-makeover ambitions in the booming market for junk bonds. Math geeks dreamed up “portfolio insurance,” a computerized scheme supposedly guaranteed to keep money safe by selling at the first sign of a market drop.

spinner image graph of stock market performance from november nineteen eighty with a twenty month decline and a three month recovery ending in november nineteen eighty two
spinner image graph of the nineteen eighty seven black monday stock market during a three month decline and the twenty month recovery

Unfortunately, all the computers caught the sell sign at the same time. The result: Black Monday, October 19, 1987. Stocks fell 22.6 percent, still the largest one-day percentage drop ever. A friend on a coast-to-coast flight said his pilot announced the prices as they tanked. As usual, selling turned out to be a terrible idea.

Within a year, stocks had erased their losses and were heading to new highs. Dot-com highs, namely. As the 1990s progressed, investors clamored for initial public offerings, or IPOs, for a parade of tech companies whose prices sometimes doubled or tripled in a day. 

spinner image chart showing a three month decline and four month recovery of the stock market in nineteen ninety during the gulf war

When I talked to investors during those bubble years, no one wanted to hear about prudent asset allocation or mutual funds. Some dot-coms, notably Amazon, showed staying power. Others vanished in the 2000 tech-stock crash, which sliced the broader market in half. Pets.com, the poster child for the fad, traveled from hot IPO to bankruptcy in just nine months.

In the 2000s, investors began to lose faith in brokers, big-name mutual fund managers and individual stocks. Real estate, the new sure thing, crashed in 2006, ushering in the financial crisis. From 2007 to 2009, stocks were down by half. Weary investors quit speculating. 

Money began to pour into—yes!—simple, low-cost index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. The most popular index funds follow the broad markets as a whole. Decades of testing show that, on average, they outperform funds run by high-priced investment managers. They almost certainly beat a random collection of individual stocks. Investors discovered asset allocation, too. They put some money into stock funds and some into bonds; bond funds cushion your losses in stocks.

spinner image chart showing stock market thirty one month downturn and fifty six month recovery from the year two thousand when the tech bubble burst

Naturally, index funds fall when the indexes do, so the question arises: After this year’s Corona Collapse, will investors once again search for something new? I hope not. Individual stocks might fail, but the broad market never does. Past crashes have been just a blip in a rising market; by one calculation, downturns since 1950, on average, have taken a little over two years to recover, if you reinvested dividends.

spinner image chart showing the stock market seventeen month decline and forty nine month recovery that occurred in two thousand seven when the real estate market crashed

Personally, I added to my stock-index funds during March. If I had been obligated to take a required minimum distribution from my IRA this year (none of us has to; the government waived RMDs for 2020), I would have drawn from my bond funds—principally Treasuries, which rose in value—while waiting for stocks to recover. If I had a 401(k), I would keep putting money into it.

It’s never the end of the world. Stock and bond index funds, plus patience, always win.

Before My First Bear Market

I found my calling in the 1960s, after I quit my low-level job at Newsweek. I was 23, and I dreamed of being a real journalist. Friends said I was nuts to leave, but I wanted to write. Back then, women at Newsweek weren't allowed to become writers.

My dad, a businessman, advised me to go to the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school. He thought I was smart enough to become the assistant to a CEO — in his opinion, a top position for a woman. I was astonished.

Luckily, a friend referred me to a publication called the “Insider's Newsletter.” It had a section for men (business, investing — serious stuff) and a section for women, which covered topics such as the emerging women's movement and the growing political interest in fairness in consumer finance. At the time, Congress was considering what became the Truth in Lending Act: ending deceptive disclosures of the interest rates lenders charged. The government was pouncing on other misleading practices, too.

The editor of the women's section offered me a job reporting and writing these stories. I said, “I don't know anything about consumer finance.” She said, “Learn."

So I did. I read books, subscribed to financial publications and found experts who patiently explained to me how financial products worked. It turned out that I loved it — especially when I pursued duplicity in the financial industry and helped consumers avoid traps. Later, I used what I'd learned to cofound the “Business Week Letter,” published by McGraw-Hill. We covered business, investing and economics. Then the Washington Post asked me to start a syndicated column on personal finance, which, happily, became a success.

Sheer luck landed me in a place where I could not only write but also develop an expertise that excited me all the time. My dad could hardly believe it. I even converted him into a supporter of job equality for women. And in 1970, after 46 female employees filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Newsweek came around, too.

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