[ufmace]

I gotta wonder, what were they invested in? I just checked my records, and my investments went down about 35% in 2008, and have long since recovered. I'm not a particularly good investor or anything. How do they manage to have their investments drop to fractions, implying much greater than 50% loss, and still have not recovered in 2015?

Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering what the deal is, because from everything I've seen around me, that is far from typical.

[MikeTV]

In the case of my dad's 401k: The company's fund manager actively traded shares on the way down, repeatedly moving the balance from declining symbols to those that seemed more stable but were really just slightly behind the curve. ...Then did the same thing when things started recovering, trying to target the stocks that seemed to be going up the fastest. Quite literally decimated their retirement.