A 10-Year Stretch That’s Worse Than It Looks

By FLOYD NORRIS
NYT

IN the last 82 years — the history of the Standard & Poor’s 500 — the stock market has been through one Great Depression and numerous recessions. It has experienced bubbles and busts, bull markets and bear markets.

But it has never seen a 10-year stretch as bad as the one that ended last month.

Over the 10 years through January, an investor holding the stocks in the S.& P.’s 500-stock index, and reinvesting the dividends, would have lost about 5.1 percent a year after adjusting for inflation, as is shown in the accompanying chart.

Until now, the worst 10-year period, by that measure, was the period that ended September 1974, with a compound annual decline of 4.3 percent.

(More here.)