[minwcnt5]

To me that's fine. The S&P 500 isn't going to instantly spike back up to 3000. There is real damage being done to corporate bottom lines. The negative growth experienced by companies during a recession compounds into all future earnings -- for the rest of time. So the way I look at it is that the market is pricing all future earnings of companies, and once the volatility has settled it will reach some new baseline that's much lower than the peak, and then continue to grow at a nominal rate, only forward-looking, with no memory of what just happened. It took 4 years for the S&P to reach its previous peak after it bottomed out in 2009. So if you've been holding onto cash, or sold near the 2020 peak, you probably have a lot of time to get back into the market and still end up better off than if you'd bought in a month ago. You don't need to time it perfectly. I can make a lot of money if I do time it correctly, but if I fail to I'm not going to count it a loss.