Subject: Re: OT: Navigating Lost Decades
Not too impressive - it sounds like a young fella with a new ChatGPT subscription who only recently discovered that wow! there are secular bear markets. But doesn't know the difference between a simple average of yearly returns and a CAGR (Exhibit 4). He laments the awful risk of someone seeing a long secular bear market during their accumulation years, citing as evidence the return trajectory of an all-equity index, not noticing that a long bear during your accumulation years would be fantastic, as you'd be buying regularly at low valuation levels. ("3% of 20-year periods delivered negative real returns...outcomes experienced by real investors whose accumulation phases coincided with unfavorable starting points.")

Average broad market forward returns are pretty low starting from unusually high market valuation levels. That's the gist of it: not wrong, but not surprising.

Jim