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Sometimes, it pays to scratch a little beneath the surface. In 2012, well-known behavioral scientist Dan Ariely published a paper that found that when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. It since has been cited in more than 400 other academic papers. Nine years later, a group of anonymous researchers at Data Colada actually looked at the data and found it clearly fudged using copy-and-paste and a random number generator. (They have to be anonymous to avoid retribution.) Dan Ariely and the other authors have since retracted the paper and disavowed any prior knowledge of the fake data.

You may have heard that it took 25 years for the stock market to recover during the Great Depression. I’ve heard it and simply accepted it as truth, until today. It’s true that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA or just “Dow”) peaked at 381.17 on September 3rd, 1929. It is also true that the DJIA did not reach that level of 381.17 again until November 23rd, 1954. That is a span of over 25 years.

However, as this 2009 NY Times article by Mark Hulbert explains, that’s not the whole story when you dig a little deeper.

[…] a careful analysis of the record shows that the picture is more complex and, ultimately, far less daunting: An investor who invested a lump sum in the average stock at the market’s 1929 high would have been back to a break-even by late 1936 – less than four and a half years after the mid-1932 market low.

The truth is that it took about 7 years for an investor to recover (1929-1936), even if they invested all their money at the very peak. This came 4.5 years after the Dow hit its period low of 41.22 in the middle of 1932. Why?

• Dividends. Back then, dividend yields were much higher. The absolute dividend payout did not drop nearly as severely as the prices. When the Dow hit a low of 41.22 on July 8, 1932 (that 90% drop you’ve read about), the dividend yield was close to 14%.
• Deflation. “The Great Depression was a deflationary period. And because the Consumer Price Index in late 1936 was more than 18 percent lower than it was in the fall of 1929, stating market returns without accounting for deflation exaggerates the decline.” Every dollar actually bought significantly more in 1936 than in 1929.
• Human misjudgment. The DJIA is composed of 30 stocks, which are picked by humans to represent the broad market. According to this article, a total of 18 companies were swapped in and out of the DJIA between 1929 to 1932. That was the highest number of changes to the Dow ever in such a short amount of time. This was a stressful time, and the Dow committee often “sold low” and “bought high” when picking companies to remove and add.

The Great Depression was still an extraordinarily painful time with minimal social safety nets, followed closely by World War II. I recommend reading The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth for a vivid picture of what it felt like to live through the Great Depression.

In normal times the average professional man makes just a living and lives up to the limit of his income because he must dress well, etc. In times of depression he not only fails to make a living but has no surplus capital to buy stocks and real estate. I see now how important it is for the professional man to build up a surplus in normal times.

Even today, how many are prepared for the stock market to go down for 2.5 years and then take another 4.5 years to get back to even?

[5/9/1932] Those men who were wise enough to sell during the boom and then keep their funds liquid in the form of government bonds, etc. were not farsighted enough or patient enough to wait almost three years to re-invest. Most of them re-invested a year or more ago and now find stock prices have sagged to 1/3 of what they were when they thought they were buying bargains.

Still, 7 years is very different than 25 years. Imagine being 50 years old and your IRA contribution at 25 years old is still underwater! The worst time period for stock market returns was actually 1972-1982, when it took roughly 10 years to recover if you invested at the peak:

[…] according to a Hulbert Financial Digest study of down markets since 1900, the average recovery time is just over two years, when factors like inflation and dividends are taken into account. The longest was the recovery from the December 1974 low; it took more than eight years for the market to return to its previous peak, which was reached in late 1972.

None of this, of course, guarantees that stocks will have a quick recovery from the market decline that began in October 2007. But it suggests that the historical record isn’t as bleak as it looks.

Updated for crazy 2020. The big news yesterday was that one measure of crude oil prices actually went negative, because futures were coming due and nobody had any place to store the oil upon delivery.

Why did this happen? Part of the reason is that too many people had the following plan:

1. Crude oil has dropped to $18 a barrel. These prices are multi-decade lows.
2. Oil prices must go up again… eventually… right? Look at that historical chart!
3. The futures market is kinda complicated… I know! I’ll buy an ETF like USO.
4. Profit!?!?

Here are a few things you should know first about the United States Oil Fund (USO) and similar oil ETPs.

You aren’t the only one who’s thought of this. Billion of dollars have come and gone into oil ETFs in the past few years. Here are articles from 2014 and 2015 when oil dropped to below $50 a gallon after being over $100:

• Cash-Burning Bets on Oil Rebound Surge in U.S. ETF Market (Nov 2014)
• The Perils of Bargain-Hunting With Oil ETFs (Jan 2015)
• Oil Prices: The Perils of Bottom Feeding (Jan 2015)

In April 2020, USO ended up having to actually change how the ETF operated in order to avoid some the market distortions that the speculation caused.

The usual market timing questions apply. Sure, the price will go up, but how long is “eventually”? It might be 1,3,5, or 10 years. If you have a specific time-frame in mind, then you can go out on the futures market and then buy a specific contract. But if oil hasn’t risen enough at that time – maybe it peaked earlier and dropped, or it peaks further in the future – you’ll have lost money.

If you buy the ETF, when is a good time to sell? $40 a barrel? $80? $100? What if you sell and then it rises another 50%?

What if it takes a while? The longer you have to hold these ETFs, the less likely they will track the price of oil (see below). Meanwhile, the ETF provider is happily collecting their annual expense ratios of 0.50% to 1%. At the current asset level of $4 billion times the 0.45% management fee, that’s $18 million a year in fees.

Your commodities futures ETF may not track the price of oil very well at all. To properly track the price of oil, you’d need to buy some oil and store it somewhere (and pay storage and security costs). These ETFs don’t do that, instead they buy oil futures contracts and keep rolling them over into new ones when they expire. That’s not the same thing. USO is designed to track daily price movements in the price of oil, not long-term movements!

Oil prices doubled from in 2009-2010. USO went nowhere. Visually, here’s a chart from Attain Capital that compares the change in USO share price (purple) as compared to the spot price of crude oil (red) when oil prices doubled between the start of 2009 and the end of 2010 (blue line adjusts USO underperformance for roll costs):

From the Bloomberg article above:

Since USO launched in April 2006, it has returned -71 percent, while the spot price of oil returned -26 percent. The last time oil roared back from a bottom was in 2009, when it returned 78 percent on the year. USO returned just 14 percent.

If you don’t understand the terms “backwardation”, “contango”, and “roll costs” then you don’t understand commodities futures. If you don’t understand something, you probably shouldn’t buy it. The more people crowd into this trade, the weirder the futures markets get. Who would think that you could get paid to take oil from someone? Take it straight from a USO executive:

John Hyland, chief investment officer of USO, says the fund is a “tactical trading vehicle predominately used by professional traders,” and not meant to be a buy-and-hold investment.

In the end, such a play is a speculative bet and it may just pay off, who knows. But it certainly isn’t a wise investment, especially if the tool you’re using doesn’t even do what you want it to do.