[floundy]

The Nikkei 225 is still below its peak value from December of 1989. The US is an outlier in terms of historical average stock market returns and there is no guarantee this outperformance will continue into the future. Actually I'd say it's less likely, given that should it continue, the US market cap will eat the entire world stock market. The US stock market is currently 62% of the world's stock market capitalization.

[tokyoseb]

The Nikkei 225 may be below its 1989 peak in price terms but you can’t ignore the dividends which an actual investment in the index would have paid during that period. On a total return basis (if you had reinvested the dividends into the index as you received them) the Nikkei passed its 1989 peak in 2021.

[deanmoriarty]

I struggle to understand why an educated crowd like HN routinely forgets dividends when posting any sort of financial charts. Total returns are what matters.

[andrewmcwatters]

I don’t know how many people in tech you’ve worked with, but the number of other people I’ve interacted with who actually read quarterly reports of publicly traded businesses has been exactly zero.

[floundy]

My point still stands, as the original comment was discussing the risk of loss over 30 years, with no additional investment that was 32 years of the investment being below its peak value.

[throw0101c]

> The Nikkei 225 is still below its peak value from December of 1989.

Okay, and how many people put 100% of their money in at December of 1998? Versus how many people have been dollar cost averaging for the last 30+ years?

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/now-do-japan/

Further, it's not like the US is immune to long periods of minimum returns:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...

Perhaps these examples are a lesson for what's important: diversification.

[ManBeardPc]

Only if you invested everything in the Nikkei on the height of the market though. Many US companies are pretty global and have a lot of sales outside the USA. In that sense the risk is a lot less concentrated outside of extreme political events.

[floundy]

Many international companies are global, and have a lot of sales to the US. But I never see anybody using that as a justification for not investing in the US.

As to the Nikkei retort this seems to be hindsight bias and ignorance of historical context, the general consensus at the time (both inside and outside of Japan) was that the Japanese economy was going to take over the world.