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by max_ 1095 days ago
You are absolutely right that the largest single day drawdown for the S&P was about 20%.

But my message is that we should not be sitting ducks for these extreme risks. There is no known method to accurately know the exact maximum drawdown that a security can get in 1 day.

Days aside. The drawdowns can be worse than we can imagine over several years. For instance people that bought the the S&P during 1929 broke even at around 1955. No profit, just breaking even. A time span of about 26 years [0]

[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

1 comments

First of all, those were during the World War years so the context matters a lot.

Overall, if you had just said to only put your money in lower risk stuff vs index funds that would make sense to me too depending on how risk averse you are. But to put 20% in something like bitcoin just seems like a weird mix of safety and gambling. I would like to see some strong numbers backing this up in the past 50 years or so where this would be more profitable AND less risky compared to the index funds.