Everyday is a great investment opportunity given a long time horizon.
It looks like if you invested in January 1990, you'd still be slightly negative as of January 2020, even after including re-invested dividends when calculated in Yen. But, when calculated in dollars, it's positive, unless you adjust for inflation, then it's negative again.
I don't know any handy English source for it, but I can tell you that this is the correct number.
Note: It's called "Nikkei 225 total return index" (N225TR). AFAIK the monthly numbers since 1979 are available from Nikkei Inc.
The more official purpose of a put option is to control your risk profile. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for an investor to do, and is something more like the opposite of gambling.
Your own statement just agrees with me. Investing and trading is gambling, but if you hedge properly you’re able to control the odds of success a bit better than you can at say a craps table.
I don't see why the current economy is substantially different from the past and sustained losses over a decade or longer aren't possible.
In Japan, they're (very) negative since 89. As much as 7%! Depending on if you measure using global inflation, US inflation, or Japanese inflation.
You realize that even in the US, there are three 20 year intervals where prices did not increase in real terms since 1890, and 1 30 year interval.
That's a decent percentage of the time.
The idea that they can never go down and stay down is lunacy.
You could rephrase this comment more cordially
> Most western economies outside the US have been negative since 2000 as well.
> In Japan, they're quite negative over the last 30 years, once one accounts for
> Over the last 130 in the United States, there have been three intervals of >20 years where prices did not increase
You can present additional information that helps illustrate a point without being an antagonist, and people will be more receptive. It's particularly counterproductive to aggressively reply in agreement with more detail.
The thing is, there is so much opportunities with long-term pay-off. E.g. high speed rail, transitioning to renewable energy, research into new technologies, etc. they just seem to lack political/societal (or generational...) will?
If the FED or EZB starts buying stocks like the BOJ, like some economists already propose, I'll see that as direct transfer to retirement savings btw. and further encouraging misdirected investment, especially if there is even a notion of doing it for propping up the stock market and not to increase inflation. Needless to say, I'd be very angry about that.