{"id":567,"date":"2008-07-25T13:54:55","date_gmt":"2008-07-25T03:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=567"},"modified":"2008-07-26T00:27:02","modified_gmt":"2008-07-25T14:27:02","slug":"stockmarket-stock-phrase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/07\/25\/stockmarket-stock-phrase\/","title":{"rendered":"Stockmarket Stock Phrase"},"content":{"rendered":"

The stock-market has been having a rough old time for the last six months, and various companies that live off of other people’s savings have been in full swing, exhorting people not to panic and withdraw their money.<\/p>\n

One line that I have heard twice recently (and many times over the years, every time the market takes a dive) goes something like this: “Throughout history, there has never been a downturn which the market hasn’t recovered from.”<\/p>\n

It sounds reassuring, except it really isn’t saying that much.<\/p>\n

Firstly, all it is saying is that the current market indices are higher than they have ever been before. Given that (at the time of writing) they are not, the statement isn’t entirely true. The market hasn’t recovered from the drop we had over the past year. (I could have said “hasn’t yet<\/em> recovered”, but that would be begging the question.)<\/p>\n

Secondly, it doesn’t consider how long<\/em> it took to recover. The 1987 stockmarket crash took over 5 years to recover from. The 1929 stockmarket crash took 22 years<\/em> to recover from. For many of you, that accounts for a quarter of the life of your grandparents. <\/p>\n

Too bad if that was when you needed to spend your savings…<\/p>\n

One day, I am going to write a standard disclaimer, and include it on virtually every post. It will explain that I am not arguing that the conclusions that someone has made are necessarily wrong; I am just arguing that the logic they used to reach it is invalid. Similarly, here, I am not saying to avoid the stockmarket. I am saying don’t base your decision on this dodgy sound-bite.<\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick whinge about the expression “Throughout history, there has never been a downturn which the market hasn’t recovered from,” while I procrastinate from reading more financial news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,21],"tags":[291,134],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","category-observation","tag-finance","tag-logic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}