How many of you actually know what a real bear market looks like? How many of you have bought and sold outside of the last fifteen years of utter valuation lunacy thanks to wild amounts of VC, SPACs spreading like a virus, super duper cheap debt and seemingly infinite liquidity? How many of you remember when 5-8% annual return was doing well and 10-15% made you a rockstar?
I was around. I remember the fear that gripped almost everything as we watched in horror and thought JPMorgan, Bank of America and Suntrust (prior to their recent merger, DANG I'M OLD) were on the brink of following Lehman and Bear Sterns. I remember when America didn't run on "too big to fail" and when putting money into something like cryptocurrency would make you a laughing stock among traders.
The only question is this – has the world really, truly, actually changed and all this basically infinite "growth" leading to unfathomable gains here to stay?
Or is "too big to fail" inevitably going to turn into "too big to succeed?"
Discuss!
How many of you were actually around and actively trading at the end of 2007 and through the first half of 2008?
byu/wasifaiboply inwallstreetbets
Posted by wasifaiboply
34 Comments
Too big to fail is a myth. I’m 365lbs and a complete failure.
I was broke as shit dropped out of college working at a dvd warehouse and had like 2 shares of Chevron on e trade.
You wanna talk about history, and let us talk about history.
The crash/dotcom bubble in ’00 took until ’07 to recover.
The crash/financial crisis in ’09 took until ’12 to recover.
The crash/Covid in ’21 took until ’23 to recover.
Wanna dig deeper? The Great Depression in ’29 took until ’54 to recover.
Do you still not see the trend? To quote Peter Lynch,
“Far more money has been lost by investors in preparing for corrections, or anticipating corrections, than has been lost in the corrections themselves.”
If you wanna sit around and find out, be my guest.
Why were y’all scared, just load up on puts and you’re good to go
I owned nvda at 8 bucks, amd at maybe 3ish, some others… didn’t have much money to start with and later needed money, so I had to sell out of those meager positions.
Lol I just read the actual post. I had no fear because I had nothing to lose really. Still don’t.
You have some good points, but as a counterpoint you should know that stocks only go up
I was actively trying to loose my virginity around that time my good sir
No one here was around then, because if you bought AAPL or GOOG or NVDA or whatever then or before and held it to now, you’re not just DFV at 10 AM rich, you’re DFV at 5 AM rich
I had about $10k in an IRA….AMA.
It took me two crises to realize that the only thing that matters in modern economic crisis is the Fed. After two rounds, now it’s very clear how the FED‘s bailout playbook impacts markets.
Bitch I started in 2000, I’ve seen small bears, big bears, and your Mom’s husband. Market has been big gay since forever.
I have been in the market since 87 and the 08 crash was hairy. I remember going to cash as the market was sliding until one Tuesday Mark Haines was doing his morning show and he mentioned that it was calm and he called the bottom. I started buying that day and practically everything started climbing. I made some big money over those next few years and I took some of the profits and I paid cash for a home in 2012.
I watched the 98-00 dotcom boom and then subsequent bust. Yahoo! was the big dog back then (not Google — it was still up and coming). Yahoo finance even had a stock market game (paper trading). There was TONS of hype in the stock market to novices. Which inflated the boom greatly and quickly.
You mentioned the recoveries are quicker now. And that is true because in 00-01 we didn’t have a Federal Reserve willing to prop up the entire market and keep every company alive once the bottom fell out. A LOT of no value companies (and some higher value ones) went bust back then as a result.
As it should be. That’s healthy for the market.
After 08 the Fed decided to stop letting nature take it’s course and intervene wherever it saw fit.
So a lot of companies that probably should have died, didn’t. They just festered.
Today there is even more Fed Res involvement, so my view is there is even less chance of complete disaster from a large company’s PoV.
Well, with a caveat — If too many things implode at once, there isn’t enough debt to print to save it all. So there is still a chance of a bust followed by a slow recovery. But it would require something rather monumental (China war, China closing exports, Nukes flying, EMPs, allied foreign money etc) to trigger.
So I think the US market is safe-ish so long as there isn’t a hugeeee sudden upheaval. Even if there is a shock that involves a recovery, it more than likely won’t take long like it used to in order to recover. And thats mostly because of the Fed Res printing money (that taxpayers don’t have) to keep things alive.
I was around for the 2008 GFC, like the retart that I am, I just didn’t have the foresight to buy and hold anything from that era, or even the Covid crash for that matter…
I opened my TD Ameritrade account in May of 2007.
I would have freaked out, but I read The Intelligent Investor right when I started. That book and the “Mr. Market” allegory helped me immensely. 2008 ended up being a great help for me. I was able to keep my cool and buy so much stuff for so cheap. I just kept dollar-cost averaging in no matter what, with high-quality companies like Apple, Mastercard, Union Pacific, etc.
sold out my OPCHX around 30. bought in around 2. it went back up. lived off that for a few years.
Weird humble brag but okay.
Tough times, was a line behind the dumpster at wendys.
Not me. I was a broke ass college student with no money already, so a collapsing economy wasn’t something that directly affected me.
Haven’t been part of a cyclical bear market yet but in general I try to avoid big losses. Better to take the little L and move the money to somewhere productive or at least less destructive. Some of the larger moving averages methods do seem like they could help avoid larger drawdowns. Harder part is knowing when to get back in and dealing with whipsaw timing.
I began my trading journey in the early summer of 2007. It has skewed my viewpoint so much that I have missed out on stock gains for the past 15 years…
Sir, this is a casino and 99% of us are PRE-RICH anyway…
Made my first trade that year. Bought at the tippy top of a stock!
The old heads in my engineering office speak of that time like it was a real eat what you kill environment; you didn’t know if you’d have a job at the end of the month, you had to have stellar quality just to compete, and you took a pay cut if it meant food on the table. Now people job hop to get one more day work from home and a bonus is almost guaranteed, it’s come a long way
Algos
I was trading penny stocks back then.Bought into a mining company from Idaho. I even made enough to eat inside of Wendy’s. I have no idea what you are talking about. We all trade on borrowed time.
Heck yah on that. Try on the 87 flash crash. That one was really scary.
My dad convinced me to buy some shitty REITs and then when those didn’t do shit I started buying shitty biotechs.
Ohh I did! That was when I thought it would be best to jump in to capitalize on the low prices. I went all in on Fannie Mae 💀
I lost over 100k in 2009. I am 55. Boy was I and still am stupid
I was. I also worked at Bear Stearns in their CMBS group. And I also took my severance and pumped it into Lehman because I thought there was no way the government would let Lehman tank after Bear.
Never been more wrong in my life.
I bought a bunch of SPY back in 2008 and still have them today.
95% of the people in the sub were probably like seven years old in 2000
I worked a trading desk during the Lehman’s crash, but that doesn’t really have shit to do with anything.
If you were the shittiest stock picker in the world and you went all in with $1 million dollars two weeks before the Lehman’s crash, it would be worth about $5 million by now. Maybe you could’ve one better riding the see-saw, but fuck it, you survived and came out on top. Whatever your worst case scenario: the great depression, the oil embargo, 1987, the Dotcom, the great recession, Covid…we always come back stronger.
Where you lose is by not participating in the big rallies because you’re so goddamned scared of what might happen.
Reads like a salty boomer who is somehow negative in his portfolio despite being active since the mid 2000s.