But I never said cherrypicked the 80s, I merely described what happened then. The entire point of this comment thread is that buying an index in the 20s is a strategy highly dependent on the index one chooses, with certain indices suffering for decades. I never said that one would be down overall, merely that anyone holding over such a long timeframe may need to wait decades to recover from certain losses (so in fact the opposite of losing money). The whole point of index investing is buying and holding, so anyone in the Nikkei for the long time had to hold through the bubble in the 80s.