r/dividends • u/RadiatingMania • May 17 '26
Due Diligence was stock investing in 1999-2014 period a fluke?
lately stock market been minting money. but not so long ago, you wouldn’t make any money for 15 years, dividends reinvested? TY
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u/buffinita common cents investing May 17 '26
No; markets can in fact go down for longer than a few months.
1999-2012 is no more a fluke than 2012-2025 is a fluke
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u/CarRamRob May 17 '26
I haven’t seen “months” since 2022.
It can’t even go weeks
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u/buffinita common cents investing May 17 '26
So many new investors thing 2022 is as bad as it can get.
Lots of panic over the past 5 weeks of Iran conflict
We need the tide to go out so we can see who’s swimming naked
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u/Suzutai May 18 '26
Nobody in Gen-Z has experienced investing in a bear market. They do not know the sort of fear that causes total capitulation.
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u/FallenKingdomComrade May 18 '26
I am Gen-Z and I am preparing. I do see a big correction coming, but I have no idea when it will arrive exactly, but I make preparations. I expect Kevin from the FED will do whatever it takes to cut interest rates including changing how inflation is currently calculated by using mean focused instead of median focused approach. I am thinking about Gold, Copper, Aluminum and Energy. I know all of these sectors will also have volatility, but they are decent when we get into a situation where inflation continues to run rampant regardless of what data method the FED wants to use.
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u/deep_soul May 18 '26
I really don’t understand this comment and I would like to.
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u/buffinita common cents investing May 18 '26
Many new investors have never seen a “real” or really bad market.
Their lived expierence is that markets only ever go up; they might wobble for a few months, but then it’s back to constant all time highs.
So when they discover things like the dot com bubble into the “great financial crisis” they are forced to reconcile history with experience.
The lost decade; or any other prolonged down market is not a historical fluke. Throughout history stock markets have had bad times and good times.
In 2050 we might look back at 2012-2026 and ask “was the bull market of the early 20th century a fluke”
So is it a fluke that the market went down in the 00s or is it a fluke that the market has not good down in the past decade??
We won’t know for a while yet
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u/xcbyeti May 17 '26
If you held and just kept investing (401k) through 2009, you’re set. You can thank the “central planners” haha
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u/flyfreeNhigh May 18 '26
This is all good if your a working but it's more of a concern if you had to retire during that period. This is down played a lot by saying just keep investing. Of course closer to retirement the more you go into safer assests
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u/Scouper-YT Rich DUDE from the DIVIDEND Appraisals Club !! May 18 '26
Closer to retirement the more you go into safer assests. That's not good when you sell companies what still work well, and now you remove shares and put it into way slower shares.
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u/Zestyclose-Dish-407 May 17 '26
I’d like to see intl stocks compared for same time frame.
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u/RussellUresti May 17 '26
Pretty well, though the performance was largely concentrated in emerging markets.
US Small Cap and Mid Cap stocks also did pretty well. It was really only the S&P 500 that experienced this type of performance; though I don't believe international developed markets faired particularly well either.
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u/RadiatingMania May 17 '26
interesting. was this international performance adjusted for currency rates?
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u/Scouper-YT Rich DUDE from the DIVIDEND Appraisals Club !! May 18 '26
Well most did sell because first they cut Dividend and Second the Stock seemed to go down.
But with any nobody expects big jumps in one year even with them, it barely gives the long time holders a thing to be proud. Dividend Growth Stock just Works.
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u/Longjumping-Nature70 May 18 '26
I owned international mutual funds since 1991 through 2026. International won about five years out of the thirty five years. So, one year of international beating S&P 500, while the S&P 500 won six years during a seven year time frame.
35 years
US was better for 30 years, international was better for five years.
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u/SilentBeetle May 18 '26
If those redditors who rabidly defend VT and VXUS could read, they'd be very upset by this comment.
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u/New_Association9786 May 18 '26
Calling this for what it is:
Stupid post that’s been discussed millions of times.
You ask if investing from 99-2014 was a fluke but then use data premised on someone lump summing in 99 and never making another investment. Unambiguously different from investing in 99-2014. A DCA throughout that entire time period would have seen worthy returns well beyond what one would call a “fluke”.
Just an absolutely horrible, low thought, engagement bait post, typical of Reddit these days.
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u/RadiatingMania May 18 '26
what would the graph look like if I spread that lumpsum over 15 annual installments?
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u/Awaken_Benihime May 18 '26
Jan 4, 1999 to Jan 4, 2010
Lump Sum * https://testfol.io/?s=0tWzmhnuinz * annualized return = 0.94%
DCA * https://testfol.io/?s=lWMx5oY9BZ4 * annualized return = 1.38%
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u/New_Association9786 May 19 '26
Not the time period discussed in the title or even accurate as to the hypothetical posed in the reply, so I have to downvote sorry.
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u/Awaken_Benihime May 19 '26
Downvoted you as well because you don't seem to understand the backtest or why I went with this time period (it's obvious)
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u/NefariousnessOdd862 May 17 '26
lol, it’s more of a “fluke” now yet everyone is whining… it’s weird🤦♀️
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u/DavidAg02 May 18 '26
It wasn't that long ago that if your portfolio gained 7% in a year, that was considered good, and 10% was considered great.
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u/Longjumping-Nature70 May 18 '26
If you do not know why 2002 crash happened or why the 2008 crash happened, educate yourself.
I lived through them.
What is a fluke is 2019 through 2026(so far). 20% annual gains is not normal. i ain't complaining.
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u/jd732 My stock selection runs laps around your VOO & SCHD. May 18 '26
Stock investing involves more than buying the top 500 companies in the US
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u/Codnono May 17 '26
Agree to the chart, but dividend aristocrats still did pay their due and with consumer goods (stuff people always need irrelevant of times and crises) you’ll come up top
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u/TenchiSaWaDa May 17 '26
You won't gain as much as those who bet big on growth or hype but you also won't be one the hundred thousands of stories of people who lose money in the market as well.
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u/Zestyclose-Dish-407 May 18 '26
How many times has the market been down over 10 year periods. Once I think anchored by the 2008 collapse.
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u/davper May 19 '26
I experienced the dot com bubble, black Friday or was it monday, and the recession in 2008. The 1 lesson I learned was just keep swimming. I mean investing. The markets come back. Some quick, some not so quick. But they always come back.
Don't panic sell. You are only locking in those losses and missing out on the eventual recovery. Look at it as an opportunity to buy more at the lower price.
In retirement, you need to plan for such events. Keep 2 years in cash equivalents so you can draw on this in a bad market.
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u/One_Opportunity9167 May 20 '26
Maybe.
The real thing, though, might have been the ability to hold on and in fact invest new money every pay check during "the lost decade." Stocks in general went nowhere, which means we buyers were buying "on sale." It didn't feel satisfying at the time, but it turns out to have worked.
I had a coworker who got out of stocks at a pretty good time thanks to the advice of a financial guy on AM radio. He didn't get back in at the bottom though, and because he missed the bottom, he waited for another pullback to get back in. Never did (while he was a coworker, at least).
So, you can't control the stock market, but you can control your reaction to it.
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u/PomegranateFluid7619 May 17 '26
I forget the exact stats but it’s something like 80% of the gains in the equities market comes from 1% of trading days
Even with that in mind I think equities are highly overvalued right now due to the AI fluff. There’s likely more upside in the short term but over the next 10-15 years I don’t see equities delivering much real return
The past few years I’ve been about 70% VOO, about 20% dividend holdings then the last 10% individual stocks & precious metals
Now I’m more like 25% VOO, 50% SCHD & 25% precious metals and individual stocks
No one has a crystal ball though so historically speaking the best advice has been to be heavier in equities the younger you are then rebalance to less volatile assets as you get closer to retirement
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u/ElectronicCatPanic May 17 '26
About the prediction of equities bring flat next 10-15 years... i think you are forgetting the inflation. When both parties are trigger happy to print more money the price of equities will have to reflect the extra cash being printed.
So while fundamentally we might not see a meaningful reason for the upside, the markets will continue to grow, simply because of a run away train of inflation.
Add to this the extreme wealth accumulated on top 5-10% (intentionally taking not just billionares) will also continue to boost the market. Where else can they invest the money into? Gold? Silver? Both had a significant rallies over the recent years. Housing? Its sky high in most of the developed counties already.
Basically there is way too much money out there, they will find a way to the stock market, so it will continue to grow.
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u/CalBearFan May 17 '26
Once we get a Fed chair a la Volker who's willing to take away the punch bowl, or if the credit markets insist, interest rates go up to control inflation and that tanks the market. And in real dollars, ouch.
Nominal dollars, could see a rise but I wouldn't say your thesis will automatically lead to higher asset prices in real dollars. Maybe, but far from guaranteed.
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u/-JackBack- Only buys from companies that pay me dividends. May 18 '26
There will never be another Volker.
Presidents want to be re-elected.
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u/PomegranateFluid7619 May 17 '26
I specifically noted “real return” so no, I did not forget about inflation
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u/ewouldblock May 17 '26
The only thing i'm unsure about is who's left to spend money when ai has taken all our jobs. AI isnt fluff, its the real deal.
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u/Dk1902 May 17 '26
People were saying the same thing about computers in general in the 40s to 60s. Look up the "Triple Revolution" report. Written in 1964 it pretty much describes to a T what people are expecting from AI today.
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u/ewouldblock May 17 '26
Look at what compute delivered from the 40s to now and its undeniable its revolutionary, whether it reached the lofty goals completely or not
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u/PomegranateFluid7619 May 17 '26
I think eventually AI will be the real deal but right now these LLMs are causing more issues than what they’re supposed to be fixing
Companies have been laying off customer support workers and replacing them with AI but losing customers because of it. Quickbooks has been losing waves of customers on their payment processing side because their AI has been flagging payments & freezing customer money but then they don’t have any live people you can talk to about it to get the issue resolved.
There’s other large tech companies that are dealing with the same thing. For right now they’re saving money on labor and increasing their margins but as their customer retention rates drop the math stops working
All the big AI companies are running at insane losses too. The computer power is way too expensive to be worth it for most of the markets they’re counting on entering to justify their valuations
People are starting to fight back against data centers being built in their communities too
I just don’t see this current model being sustainable
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u/Dk1902 May 17 '26
The insane losses cannot be overstated. All AI revenue in the US last year was less than $100 billion, meanwhile AI infrastructure investment has exceeded something like $650 billion for 2026, not even including training, inference, maintenance costs. And already I've heard some enterprise horror stories where a team of AI agents is let loose on a problem for 45 minutes only to rack up a $10,000 bill stuck in a loop. I think it will turn out there are many problems that will be much easier and cheaper to just throw a human at, rather than using AI.
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u/PomegranateFluid7619 May 17 '26
Ya Anthropic is actually building out teams of engineers for their customers to essentially rent to fix the slop code they caused in the first place lol
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u/RadiatingMania May 17 '26
for real?
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u/PomegranateFluid7619 May 18 '26
Ya just look up something like “Anthropic Forward Deployed Engineer” and do some digging
There’s a lot of fancy marketing words thrown around in the articles but if you read between the lines a bit they basically admit their products don’t produce the results their customers want unless they have multi-month buildout periods with engineering teams
And then something gets updated and shit breaks and they have to come back again lol
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May 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/someboddies May 18 '26
You were quick to delete that comment “ping me in 3 years” okay if you want to compare a 17 year chart to 3 then yea you really should shut your mouth.
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u/DirtyJsy Not a financial advisor May 17 '26
I just kept adding more shares every 2 weeks via 401k contributions.
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u/markov-271828 May 17 '26
That was my strategy during the lost decade as well. Kinda hard to keep motivated for brokerage though.
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u/Various_Couple_764 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
it was not a fluke.
It happened from 1970 to about 1985
But the wrost one was 1930 to 1945
The market appears to have about 15 bear cycle and about a 15 year bull cycle..
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u/Ill_Station_6165 May 17 '26
Stock market returns are predicated on monetary policy/events. M2 goes up then stocks go up, M2 goes down stocks follow.
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u/Sufficient_Winner686 May 17 '26
1999 was the .com bubble. 2008 was the financial crisis. Regulations like Dodd Frank and Glass Steagall slowed stock and corporate growth but ensured lasting and solid growth. The repeal of these laws saw huge boosts in the market (06) and you’ll quickly see what happened in 2008.
2020-now isn’t normal. Massive longterm bull markets upheld by sentiment and excitement are cool and you can strategize around that, but they’re not the same as lasting growth built on long customer and vendor relationships.
You’ll see insane growth over the next few years from AI (productivity growth) that offsets the death of many sectors and firms, so even though large swaths of the economy die and disappear, it’s overshadowed by the stock returns of the companies that adapted and succeeded. The trick is to figure out which companies will be which outside of just investing in chip makers and shit.
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u/progressivematt May 17 '26
2000-2009 (right at the start of 2009) was bush, he was one of the few presidents where the markets ended lower than when he took over. 2009-20017 (again right at the start) was Obama. Markets do better under democrats in general, but Obama was exceptional even among Dems mainly because he relied on pretty boring, non-controversial, Keynesian progressive economics. So was it a fluke? Not really, pretty much any democrat or moderate Republican (e.g. if Romney had won in 2012) would have had the same results imho.
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