a high in the mid-60s and didn't break through that high for almost 20 years. If you were an investor who needed that cash during that long period of time, you would have been screwed if you had stayed 100% invested in stocks. Keep in mind that inflation was raging then, and the Dow does not adjust for inflation, so the real value of equities declined more sharply than is shown in that graph.

Another similar period (though less severe) was from the late '90s through the end of the Great Recession in 2009. I remember that in early 2009 I had a significant net loss on all of my kids' 529 plans and on my 401k that I had been investing in since the mid-1990s — but I was poor initially, so most of my money had been invested from 1999-2008. I remember joking with my wife that at that point we would have been better off putting all that money under a mattress for all those years. Luckily I was a young guy at the time and had a long investment horizon, so I rode out that period fully invested without much consequence, but it would have been different had I, say, retired in the late '90s and needed that money to live on during that next decade.