J. Hardy wrote:... the market has been doing quite well for nearly a decade and will do so again following the next crash.
Igy is rightfully getting flak for his casual, overly generalized "predictions," but so too should those who pretend the market will immediately rebound after the next big crash. History, which you've exploited in making that kind of optimistic claim, tells us otherwise. After the 1929 crash, prices dove solidly for three years, and maintained an overall negative trend for 20 years. After post-war markets peaked in 1968, the overall trend was downward for 14 years. Depending on your point of view, the entire first decade of the 21st century maintained a negative trend, and buy and hold investors would have lost their shirts.
Of course, we can look at shorter time scales and find plenty of ups and downs within these three very long down periods since 1929 (20, 14 and 9 years long), but the reality is, when the market goes into freefall again, people's holdings will very likely take a decade or more to recover lost ground, longer to regain original buying power when you factor inflation. For those of us who can tolerate a wild ride, maybe it's not such a big deal. But everyone investing in the markets should take a realistic assessment of their own risk tolerance and decide whether and to what degree they can tolerate that realistic scenario, and protect themselves adequately. Maybe that means balancing the portfolio in a way that they earn 8%/year during this strong bull market, instead of trying to gobble up 15-20%/year.