---
title: "The United States is a &#34;crazy&#34; country. Why? Because we put all our money into the stock mar"
description: "The United States is a &#34;crazy&#34; country. Why? Because we put all our money into the stock market, and about every ten years, there's a bear market tsunami that causes the market to plummet by 5"
type: "topic"
locale: "en"
url: "https://longbridge.com/en/topics/38741764.md"
published_at: "2026-02-14T10:59:09.000Z"
author: "[猫的名字叫奥利奥](https://longbridge.com/en/profiles/15248623)"
---

# The United States is a &#34;crazy&#34; country. Why? Because we put all our money into the stock mar

The United States is a "crazy" country. Why? Because we put all our money into the stock market, and about every ten years, there's a bear market tsunami that causes the market to plummet by 50%. Then it recovers. We've been doing this for the past hundred years, it's insane.

Stock prices go up and down. The purpose of market volatility is to make people make wrong decisions.

When the stock price goes up, you're happy; when it goes down, you're upset; when it falls even harder, you might even feel despair. Eventually, you can't take it anymore and sell all your stocks at the low point... then the price goes back up. So you buy them back at the high point. Then the price falls again. That's why the average individual investor's performance significantly lags the market.

You throw people into highly volatile stocks, and once the market drops 30%, their first reaction is panic, then they sell everything and leave. We've seen this happen again and again. You can keep telling people to "hold on," you can try to train them with behavioral science to make the right decisions, but they mess it up every time.

The lesson here is: what matters is not just the expected return, but also the path you take to get there. This is called path dependency.

An asset that rises in a straight line by 4% per year might be more valuable than one that rises by 8% but is highly volatile. Why? Because we are human, we have emotions, we are naturally...

Sometimes, the situation in financial markets can get very, very bad. Remember the 2008 financial crisis? When bank stocks fell to single digits? When we thought we were heading into a full-blown depression? I assure you, this will happen again. You might think you can tough it out, keep dollar-cost averaging into mutual funds. But you can't. You'll be scared out of your mind, because it's a human instinct.

No worries… That's the nature of the stock market…

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> **Disclaimer**: This article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice.
