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Originally Posted by Smooth Operator
Who knows what will happen going forward, RP ... but I'm not all that concerned since I'll likely be holding these low-cost index funds for a loooooong (at least the next 25 years) time.
Just gunna keep dollar-cost-averaging money into the account ... rebalance occasionally ... and adjust the stock to bond ratio as I get older.
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There is a very bright economist named Harry S. Dent that I have followed for years. He is a Harvard MBA. He wrote the book The Great Boom Ahead back in 1992 where he predicted that the Dow, which was around 2000 at the time, would go up all the way to 10,000 or higher. Then he wrote the Roaring 2000s in about 1998. In that book he updated his estimates and predicted the Dow would probably go up to 20,000 and possibly as high as 30,000 which turned out to be overly optimistic. In both those books he predicted that we would have a huge boom period that would last until approximately 2008 or 2009. But he always predicted that the prosperity would come to an end sometime around 2008 or 2009 and that after that we would go into a terrible depression that would last for years. And back in around 1990, he predicted that the Japanese economy would collapse and would not recover for more than 20 years.
His predictions are based mainly on demographics. His numbers are never going to be perfect. He can't tell you exactly how low the Dow will go. The low could be 3000 or it could be 4500. Nobody knows exactly. And there can be unforseen short-term events that can throw things off course temporarily. But in terms of market direction on a long term basis, I think Dent has been very accurate. He says that the next boom period will not start until somewhere between 2020 and 2023. By the way, he also accurately predicted the housing crash. His timing may have been off by a year, but all the way back in 1998, he warned something to the effect of, "Don't be buying your $10 million dream house any time around 2007, which will be the top of the housing market, because you will see the house lose around 70% of its value.
Anyway, Dent's new book is called The Great Depression Ahead.