One little known fact about me is that that I’ve actually had first-hand experience with our last two stock market crashes. First, as a young investor during the dot.com bubble. Second, as an advisor during the 2008 financial crisis.

As we’ve reached stock market highs recently I’ve been thinking a lot about our last recession. At that time we saw a peak of the DJIA, (“the Dow” and the typical benchmark used when you hear a reference to “the market”) on October 9th, 2007 and a bottom on March 6th, 2009. By that time it had lost over 54% of its value. So if someone bought into an investment tracking the Dow on October 9th 2007 their investment would have been about half that value on March 6th, 2009.