Obviously, nobody enjoys watching their stocks go down -- except maybe short-sellers. The past few months have been difficult for long-term investors, especially those focused on growth investing. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded Jan. 27, Fool.com contributor Travis Hoium takes a step back and shares some of the most important things investors should keep in mind at times like these.
Travis Hoium: That brings up where I wanted to start this discussion, and that's with a little bit of history and perspective on what's going on.
This is a chart of the last three months in the market. This is the pain that we're feeling if you own growth stocks. The numbers are probably even worse than this, particularly early in 2022. A lot of down days here, the last month or so. But let's zoom back a little bit. If we go back to -- this one's back to 2013, this is far back as I can pull the Nasdaq total return.
But the Nasdaq total return up 4X in S&P 500 doing pretty well there as well. Pull back even further, this is back to the start of 1990, 29X for the Nasdaq, 23X for the S&P 500. This is what we're investing for, this is long-term. This is why we take a long-term view of what are companies doing over years and decades.
Now what are they doing on a day-to-day basis? A few things that Rick alluded to is a couple of quotes that I really like, "Your volatility is the price of admission." Our superior long-term returns, you have to pay the price to get the returns many aren't. That's from [former Motley Fool contributor] Morgan Housel. [Motley Fool co-founder] David Gardner said, "Stocks always go down faster than they go up, but they always go up more than than they go down." Then I couldn't figure out -- this is maybe old enough that there's nobody to attribute this to -- but "The market takes the stairs up and the elevator down."
If you are in the world of crypto, I really like this one, stocks takes to stairs up and the elevator down. Crypto takes the elevator up and the window down. So if you have any crypto investments, that was a funny one, I thought, given what's happened in the last few weeks in the crypto market.
